Invisible Ships and Boiling Frogs: The End of Industrial Affluence

By Karl North | June 7, 2010

It is said that when the ships of the Old World first approached the New World, they were sometimes invisible to the indigenous people of the Americas because the latter could not imagine such a thing as a fleet of large sailing ships, and simply did not believe their eyes.

In the same way, when a large enough change looms in our future, we tend to dismiss calls to pay attention as the talk of eccentrics or screwballs. If the magnitude of the change is beyond our historical experience, we simply cannot imagine it.

The end of the industrial era as we know it is one such change. This essay is an attempt at persuasion – that the ships of change really are on the horizon.

The energy sources that underpin industrial civilization will become permanently scarcer over the next decades, and the material consumption we have become used to over the last two centuries will decline accordingly as a degree of deindustrialization occurs.

The impulse to dismiss such statements is understandable considering the implied magnitude of change in our lives. As a rule the mass media avoid the subject. Thus, the general public is woefully uninformed. Yet much of the information that makes the case for this claim is hard science published by scientists who are among the leaders in their fields, experts who have not had the necessary access to the public to make their case. So let me summarize some of their key findings.

The story starts with the well-documented fact that many of the raw materials that have been essential to construct and run industrial civilization – everything from dishwashers to space shuttles – are finite. When they are depleted, they are gone forever, unless we recycle them, which in the main we have not done.

The central raw material is the high quality energy in the fossil fuels: coal, gas, and especially oil. No energy substitute can come close to providing the net energy achieved after the mining and processing of fossil fuels. Moreover, the reason these energy sources are central is that they have fueled the massive access and accelerating depletion of all other essential raw materials. This accelerated extraction of the planet’s finite resources is unprecedented in human history.

Because of depletion and declining quality that becomes more energy expensive to produce, fossil fuels and other strategic raw materials are becoming scarce, causing a permanent upward trend in the cost of keeping the modern economy going, much less growing. Powerful, technologically developed nations like the US have been somewhat shielded from the effects of this scarcity, and have continued business as usual until recently.

This brings us to the second part of the story. Increasingly in recent decades, powerful interests in the US have been exporting our industrial and agricultural production to other parts of the world where it can exploit cheap labor. It’s a sort of deindustrialization but we still get the goods, which keeps us quiet.. And the US has used its power to go farther and farther afield to extract raw materials from other countries. To put it mildly, other peoples have never been happy with this arrangement, but US economic and military power has maintained the system until now.

This is about to change. The annual cost of our global military machine, adding in costs hidden from congressional budgets, is a trillion dollars. The US cannot afford this, so we get other countries to lend us the money by buying Treasury bonds. Countries like China and Saudi Arabia, from which we buy oil and cheap goods, own a lot of dollars because we have little to sell them in return. Until now most of these foreign dollar holders have been willing to use their dollars to buy treasury bonds, thus financing our ballooning government and trade debts, themselves due in large part to the cost of our trillion dollar a year military machine. As the long-term nonviability of the US economy became obvious to lenders, they are finding other ways of disposing of their dollar reserves rather than finance our debt, a trend that eventually will crash the value of the dollar. This alone will shrink our economy drastically. Combined with the inevitable decline in access to cheap energy and other strategic raw materials, the effect will be momentous.

This brings us to the third part of the story. In addition to sabotaging our economy by exporting production, our financial class has caused long-term damage to our economy another way. In the name of keeping it afloat, it has kept a faltering economy going by encouraging people and businesses to go increasingly into debt to purchase more stuff. Our investor class does this because in the domestic economy it can make more money from interest on debt than from profit on the production of real wealth. The current residential and commercial real estate melt down is only part of a larger resulting debt bubble. As it gradually and inevitably deflates it will end a two-decade-long artificial prop to economic growth.

There is a fourth part of the story, the damage to forest, fisheries, soils, aquifers and other parts of the natural resource base that underpin modern prosperity. Those chickens are now coming home to roost as well. As the subject is finally getting some media attention, I will not dwell on it here. To raise concern, hopefully it will be sufficient to quote scientist Lester Brown, who has devoted many years to informing the public of the erosion of earth’s carrying capacity:

“A team of scientists led by Mathis Wackernagel concluded in a 2002 study published by the U.S. National Academy of Sciences that humanity’s collective demands first surpassed the earth’s regenerative capacity around 1980. Today, global demands on natural systems exceed their sustainable yield capacity by an estimated 25 percent. This means we are meeting current demands by consuming the earth’s natural assets, setting the stage for decline and collapse.”

To summarize:

  • The global depletion of finite resources and the extent of damage to renewable ones has proceeded to a point where the cost of producing many of the goods that are essential to keep industrial civilization running will soon become prohibitive.
  • Plagued by debt that our financial class has created by off-shoring US productive capacity and replacing it with a fictional economy of credit, we can no longer afford the military cost of the imperial domination that sustains our plunder of other nation’s resources and cheap labor. These nations are taking back control over their wealth, which will end the prosperity we have enjoyed for so long at their expense.

Coincidentally or not, these trends have reached critical mass, a point where their negative consequences for our society and what is left of its industrial base begin to appear with increasing frequency. It should be clear from the nature and longevity of these trends that we are not talking about a simple dip in the business cycle, but something more permanent.

Why is the US public so unaware of this gathering crisis? There is the consistent pattern of disinformation from government and media, and there is the frog-boiled-alive effect.

It is said that if you heat a frog in water slowly enough, it doesn’t realize what’s happening until it’s been boiled alive. Though the trends described above are coming to a tipping point now, they have been accumulating for decades, slowly enough to be under the radar of most of us. We are like the frog in the slowly heating water. The number of work hours to maintain a family income and the debt serfdom to pay for higher education have been rising slowly enough over recent decades to become routine. Few people see the implications of the decades-long rise in the price of raw materials, the growing imbalance in our international trade, or of an accelerating national debt that has made the US government technically bankrupt ever since debt accumulation began in earnest in the Second World War. Few have noticed that countries we have exploited to prop up our prosperity, seeing the ultimate decline of a United States being bled dry in unwinnable wars, are not only declaring economic independence but also actually exerting economic sovereignty. This is another development that will contribute to our industrial decline.

So what is to be done? First, we must educate ourselves about this new state of affairs, which is unprecedented in the last 200 years. Second, we must confront the situation with a positive effort to retrench our economy by relocalizing the production of its most essential goods and services. Primary among these is food production. Across the industrial world efforts are afoot to envision the kind of relocalized agriculture that could be sustainable through the coming decades of descent to a lower energy economy.

As a concerned farmer/educator my contribution to this visioning process is involvement in TCLocal, a project begun in nearby Tompkins County, New York to envision the changes necessary to relocalize many aspects of county economy and life in response to a future of dramatically lower access to energy and strategic raw materials, declining US power and the ensuing partial deindustrialization of our economy.

My first contribution to TCLocal is a vision of relocalization of food production that addresses several needs that I see. We need to understand that a sustainable food system will require not only counties and regions to regain self-sufficiency in food production, but to design much more input self-sufficiency into farms themselves as well. We will also need dramatic changes in local land use, bringing agriculture back into urban areas and reorganizing land use in the agrarian hinterland of upstate New York towns like Ithaca and communities everywhere.

These changes will require the political will to exert local community sovereignty over more of the decisions that affect our lives. Whole nations are proclaiming food sovereignty; so should our rural communities here.

Industrialization, backed by a fabricated “natural law” of freedom of private capital, has allowed urban centers of power to despoil rural places and destroy agrarian communities, first in their immediate hinterlands – places like upstate New York – then in distant banana republics.

The inevitable deindustrialization to come will give our rural communities and smaller cities the chance to regain control: reclaim commerce from the big box chains, take back land use decisions from local real estate mafias allied with industrial capital, and free our farmers from the economic serfdom and ecological distortions imposed by agribusiness multinationals. But to do this we must decolonize our minds, cleansing them of the laissez-faire, everyone-for-himself, devil-take-the-hindmost cultural values that have so well served industrial elites. We must rediscover agrarian, communitarian values.

It is in keeping with these goals that I undertook a series of papers that explore a preliminary vision of a relocalized food system for Tompkins County. My effort is part of an ongoing TCLocal project to write articles, many already published at the same site, that address all aspects and areas of relocalization that our group expects are needed now and in the future. We encourage your interest and input in the hopes of building an ongoing productive exchange of ideas with similarly concerned citizens. We hope such cooperative efforts will facilitate the transition of our upstate communities to a healthier, more sustainable society.

Topics: Core Ideas, Recent Additions, Social Futures, Peak Oil, Relocalization, Uncategorized | 1 Comment » |

Visioning County Food Production – Part Four

By Karl North | April 19, 2010

Urban Agriculture

This series of articles is an exploration of designs for agriculture in Tompkins County to approach sustainability in a future of declining access to the cheap energy and other inputs on which our industrialized food system relies. In earlier parts of this series, I proposed principles of agroecosystem design, addressed the key issues of fertility, energy, water, and pest control, and pictured the future county food system as a whole: its historical context and implications, and interdependencies among the parts that will make them most effective as an integrated system. I said that providing for the local food needs of urban populations requires a design that integrates three overlapping categories of production systems: urban agriculture systems (many small islands of gardening in the city center), peri-urban agriculture (larger production areas on the immediate periphery), and rural agriculture (feeder farms associated with village-size population clusters in the hinterland of the city but close enough to be satellite hamlets).

In this month’s article I will consider the needs and resources that will shape the design of urban agriculture systems in the city of Ithaca, and offer a case study as a design example.

The high institutional and population density of urban areas promotes labor-intensive production methods, community regeneration through cooperative management, and transport efficiency for agricultural inputs and products. The ability to have more farmers/acre permits the kind of management-intensive system that maximizes productivity achieved by close monitoring and good timing throughout the growing season. It allows a division of labor to manage diversified production integrated into one system.  One neighbor could grow rabbits (Figure 1) and provide manure and meat while another grows vegetables, and a third concentrates on fruits.

Figure 1. Urban rabbit hutches in Cuba

The plethora of city institutions presents opportunities to build gardening appendages on existing social structures organized for other purposes. In the sudden energy shortage that transformed Cuba’s agriculture, schools, workplaces and even governmental institutions were quick to become partly self-sufficient in food production. As awareness builds that gardening is a form of physical education whose value is increasing relative to, say, football, schools will see the need to devote more playground space to school gardens.

Intensive Design

The high productivity of urban agriculture has proven itself in many cities, notably in the severe food crisis that Cuban cities experienced in the 1990s.[i] Productivity in urban agriculture comes in great part from intensive design and management. The greater labor required for intensive production is potentially available in urban agriculture, and can make it highly productive in several ways. Space can used more efficiently than in extensive row cropping. Intensive growers can plant many vegetables in permanent beds instead of rows, minimizing walk or machine alleys between rows, and concentrating soil building in the beds rather than the whole field. Also farmers can plant catch crops of fast maturing foods like salad or cooking greens in spaces between large slower maturing ones like broccoli. Tiered design that uses light efficiently is possible. Crops can be grown in companion polycultures to trade ecological services, legumes like pole beans fixing nitrogen for the corn that provides the pole, or a pea row climbing a wall while fertilizing a carrot row. Maximum use and close management of protective devices like frames and cloches permit not only season extension but also more effective temperature and moisture control of plant growth during the regular season. Finally, the consumers of urban-grown food are close enough to permit effective recycling of nutrients back into the garden soil, partially or totally eliminating the need for space for compost crops.  

For all these reasons urban spaces have such high food productivity potential that they can be nearly 15 times more productive than rural farms.[ii] In WWII residential “Victory” gardens in the US produced a quantity of fresh vegetables equal to the total commercial output of these foods.

The Ithaca Urban Environment

Ithaca’s topography of central flatlands surrounded by steep hills presents distinctive opportunities and constraints for urban garden design in each area. Josh Dolan’s map of current and potential community and school garden sites in Tompkins County illustrates some of the possibilities.[iii]

Figure 2. Community and School Gardens of Tompkins County

Community gardens (blue pegs), school and educational gardens (yellow pegs), farmer’s markets (green pegs), and finally sites which have expressed an interest in gardens or identified as potential sites for new community gardens (light blue flags).

On the hillsides some food production will require terracing, but the many south and west facing retaining walls and house walls in residential neighborhoods of Ithaca’s steep hills are opportunities for vertical growing. This will maximize use of space, which is important in urban gardens. Vine plants can sometimes grow either from the top of the wall down or from the bottom up. Twine or poles laid against the walls help plants like tomatoes or beans get a grip going up, and planks or slates shoved between wall stones support heavy fruits like melons or squash as they grow bigger.

Projections of climate change for the Northeast include a 20-30% increase in winter precipitation over this century, but hotter summers when water is needed for growing, suggesting a greater need for seasonal water capture.[iv]

The hills of Ithaca have great potential for gravity irrigation if water is distributed downhill through many residential gardens. Pools at each site will store water to provide gravity irrigation to terraces via berms and swales. Institutional sites might justify tapping this gravity flow to power small grain mills or electric generators.

On the city’s flatlands current uses of many commercial sites will become obsolete in the energy descent. Energy inefficient businesses and parking lots will become prime sites for takeover by guerilla gardeners, building pressure for legalization. Water is relatively abundant in our environment, but because of its importance for highly productive food growing, water reserves collected from roof drains into garden-side irrigation pools will be vital to build resilience into urban production systems. More resilience can be achieved by routing roof water first into attic or upper story tanks for household use, and the overflow to irrigation pools.

Visioning an urban agriculture case

A group of neighbors has decided to form a loose gardening cooperative, because a pooled effort will solve the core production problems of fertility, water, pest control and energy more efficiently than completely individual projects, and promote sharing of equipment and pooling of knowledge too. Individually in backyards they grow a few vegetables and fruits, often in containers they can bring inside for extended season growing[v]. Many neighbors have just enough small stock like rabbits, chickens or pigeons to process organic kitchen garbage. However, their yards are mostly too small for the amount of food they want to produce as a co-op.

The neighborhood group has agreed to devote most backyard space to compost production and irrigation water collection for the co-op. They have quietly attached composting toilets to their houses and built filter/digesters for household greywater, and little ponds to store grey water and roof water, while collecting support for legalization when the time is politically ripe. Eventually the city created property ownership and lease contracts with management agreements that provide incentives for ecological management like composting of residential waste streams and maintenance of food perennials on the property.

To make space for the main garden the neighborhood co-op razed a building abandoned as too costly to renovate for energy efficiency, and depaved an adjacent parking lot that became obsolete when the city got serious about public transportation. The land owners were happy to lend the properties in long term agreements in return for land tax credits that the city had created for land lent for urban agriculture, As in the urbanization of agriculture in Cuba  (Figure 3), our neighborhood co-op often left rubble in place and created raised beds over it with soil imported from nearby rural farms and compost from backyard and municipal production sites. This photo also illustrates the use of a pest insect trap crop of corn planted at the end of the raised beds containing other crops.

Figure 3. Urban coop garden, Pinar del Rio, Cuba

The co-op employs a master gardener to design and manage the garden to include the polycultures, rotations of crops among beds, water, compost and mulch acquisition and application that will maximize the health of the system. Because it integrates a greater diversity of crops and habitats, this system achieves a higher level of sustainability than community gardening by individual allotment. Each household is assigned responsibility for working a section of the garden under the direction of the manager. As different crops or polyculture combinations rotate through each section, all neighbors gradually have become skilled at growing all the foods that the co-op produces. The manager arranges for extra labor when necessary, as in planting and harvesting, for compost and water from backyard ponds, and for supplemental compost from the city’s public composting enterprise.

The project design includes a number of elements not yet found in many urban gardens: hot and cold frames and nursery beds to feed transplants into the garden; glass bed covers to provide season extension; habitats for beneficials and other native species; insectaries, bird houses and trap and repellent crops for pest control; border hedges of nut and fruit bushes and trees and other perennial crops; and artistic corners in which to rest and enjoy the garden.

The neighborhood co-op provides regular shares of harvests to its members, and sells surplus produce in a market stand on site using the local county currency.  Some members operate small processing enterprises to preserve co-op output for the neighborhood.

This model of urban agriculture may work in a number of locations, but many other models will be needed that are adapted to conditions of specific sites or parts of the city.

[i] Murphy, Catherine. 1999. Cultivating Havana: Urban Agriculture and Food Security in the Years of Crisis. Development Report Nº12. Food First: Institute for Food and Development Policy.

http://www.foodfirst.org/pubs/devreps/dr12.pdf

[ii] Ableman, Michael. “Agriculture’s Next Frontier: How Urban Farms Could Feed the World.” Center for Urban Agriculture at Fairview Gardens. 2007. http://www.fairviewgardens.org/pub_next_frontier.html

[iii]http://maps.google.com/maps/ms?hl=en&ie=UTF8&msa=0&msid=112967405631074443966.00046b4b4eb5e29a3ab69&t=h&ll=42.435707,-76.459758&spn=0.014475,0.026994&z=15

[iv] Confronting Climate Change in the Northeast. A summary of a 2007 study conducted in part by the Union of Concerned Scientists. http://www.climatechoices.org/assets/documents/climatechoices/new-york_necia.pdf

[v] http://www.gardeningknowhow.com/urban/designing-your-container-vegetable-garden.htm

Topics: Agriculture, Northland Sheep Dairy, Core Ideas, Recent Additions, Social Futures, Peak Oil, Relocalization, Uncategorized | No Comments » |

Visioning County Food Production – Part Three

By Karl North | March 8, 2010

­

Seeing County Food Production as an Integrated Whole

In Part One of this series, I proposed principles of agroecosystem design for growers to follow if agriculture is to approach sustainability in a future of declining access to the cheap energy and other inputs on which our industrialized food system relies. I said that providing for the local food needs of urban populations requires a design that integrates three overlapping categories of production systems: urban agriculture systems (many small islands of gardening in the city center), peri-urban agriculture (larger production areas on the immediate periphery), and rural agriculture (feeder farms associated with village-size population clusters in the hinterland of the city but close enough to be satellite hamlets).  In Part Two I addressed four key issues – fertility, energy, water, and pest control – and the kinds of agroecosystems that might incorporate sustainable solutions.

In this month’s article I will picture the future county food system as a whole: its historical context and implications, and interdependencies among the parts that will make them most effective as an integrated system.

In future parts of this County Food Production series I will offer visions of each type of production system that incorporate as many of the sustainable design solutions from Part Two as seem applicable to each environment. Finally, I will explore aspects of policy and social organization that could facilitate the necessary transformation to a relocalized food system.

As the most ambitious part of this visioning project, the scenarios in this article and future ones carry the most risk of vulnerability and even failure due to historical contingencies that are impossible to predict and even hard to envisage at this juncture.  Therefore, instead of a full-scale scenario for the county that could be misinterpreted as a plan, I will describe ideal types of urban, peri-urban, and rural systems to illustrate what might be beneficial or even necessary to feed the population of the county.

Learning from history: pre-fossil fuel food miles

How relocalized does a food economy need to be in the energy descent era? Throughout history, food security everywhere has been heavily dependent on a reliable supply of staple foods, especially starch staples like root crops, pulses (beans, peas, etc.) and grains. Our region once was self-sufficient in staples but gradually imported most of them. To regain food security, we must establish a measure of food sovereignty as local policy, especially in staple foods.

A look at NYS history is a reminder that easily conserved and transportable food commodities traveled far before the railroads existed, and to a degree even before the canal system was built.

Pre-canal overland commerce in high-value imports and industrial goods, paid for in farm products, was common across New York State. The account in Figure 1 shows the sorts of goods that flowed in both directions.[i]

Figure 1. Goods that historically made up the bulk of commercial trade in 19th century rural New York

By 1830 the New York canal system linked most agricultural depots of the state to waterways–the Great Lakes and lesser lakes like Lake Champlain and the Finger Lakes to the main state rivers–and thence to the population centers and to foreign trade. Figure 2 is an account of the primary commodities in the lake traffic through Buffalo in 1847 and provides a rough measure of the tonnage and kinds of foods that moved long distances in that era.[ii]

Figure 2. Great Lakes traffic arriving at Buffalo, 1847

In the late 19th century the railroads took over most transport of farm products out of rural areas; even certain bulkier items that travel well like potatoes, onions, cabbage, and livestock were included in state-wide commerce and beyond.

Apart from food security, the stimulus to the local economy and the provision of fresh, superior quality food are good reasons to produce as much food locally as possible. But consideration of the above historical perspective suggests that the question of how much we need to depend on locally produced food turns on the ability of the state to promote the revival of the railroads or, failing that, at least the canal system. The existence of long-distance trade before the era of energy ascent in products like grain that travel well suggests that during energy descent widespread trade in some agricultural products will persist despite rising transport costs.

However, many energy descent analysts[iii] believe that the US economy has been so undermined by internal and external debt and dependence on fossil fuels that state and federal institutions will eventually be unable to maintain the present social order, much less take on the reconstruction of pre-oil transportation networks. This scenario suggests the need for a high level of local food production. Analysis of probable futures at this macro-level clearly suffers from the uncertainty surrounding so many of the key variables. Perhaps the best insight one can draw from the records of earlier food systems is a ranking of agricultural products for localization, according to their sensitivity to a shrunken distance economy.

Even assuming the construction or restoration of energy-efficient transport networks, other concerns ultimately will force increasing dependence on locally grown food. A sustainable food system must recycle nutrients. The historical expansion of US food miles relied first on the depletion of fertile virgin soils, then on cheap fertilizer and other manufactured inputs. Without the crutch of increasingly expensive inputs, declining agricultural yields in farms distant from consumers will force large foodsheds to shrink over time. Even proposals for the reorganization of the national and global food system into bioregional systems or foodsheds larger than counties have ignored the nutrient cycling imperative, which becomes increasingly difficult as food is grown farther from where it is eaten. This raises the question of how to feed large cities in a purported Northeast foodshed and still sustain the health of the soil that grows the food.

As early as 1862, scientists were writing of a metabolic rift that had developed between city and countryside.[iv] The rift was both biological and social; the nutrient cycle had broken as the nutrients that fed urbanites no longer returned to the rural lands where the food was grown, and urbanites had lost appreciation of the fact that urban prosperity ultimately depends on the health of the land and its natural systems.

The social/cultural rift may be the biggest obstacle to change. The very existence of cities depends on the accumulation of a surplus of wealth from agriculture and other raw material extraction from the land. The temporary ability of humanity to substitute fossil fuel dependent technologies for human labor and the soil fertility and other services originally supplied by natural systems created the illusion that human labor and ecological services are of little importance in agriculture, and therefore have little bearing on the question of the survival of cities. Technology, apparently an urban product, became paramount in the hierarchy of urban cultural values. In that hierarchy, technology could even replace the social capital of healthy families and communities that traditionally gave agrarian society much of its strength and resilience.

The county needs to be ready for these challenges. The limiting factor that inhibits food system change is not biophysical knowledge of how to do it, but social knowledge of the power structures that have closed down local food economies and prevented their revival. Successful strategies for change can emerge only from a deeper understanding of how things work in the system of power relations, both in the county and beyond.

A county policy framework that effectively favors local production and reverses the power shift in modern society toward centers that today exploit peripheries will ultimately improve local quality of life. In the early 19th century, before the rise of competition from the Midwest, agrarian NY communities sold to nearby cities and enjoyed a relative prosperity that reflects the true dependence of urban affluence on the wealth of the land. Recently it was estimated that in Maine, $10 a week spent on locally produced food would put $104 million into the local economy.[v] This suggests that a public program to relocalize the county food economy eventually could sell politically as a core element in regenerating the local economy overall.

Interdependencies in the county food system

The three types of county agriculture to be explored in this series are best suited to different, complementary roles in county food production. Taking its cue from the pattern in earlier times, urban agriculture will give priority to production of vegetables and fruits for fresh consumption that can be grown intensively, in raised beds for example. Peri-urban agriculture will supplement urban gardens with produce that requires more space, and will support some livestock. Rural agriculture will be responsible for most of the large animal production and large-scale field cropping. A high priority of farming in satellite villages will be to grow the bulk of the staples, like potatoes, oats, roots, brassicas, legumes, squash, alliums, and apples, which have proven to be dependable in cool, temperate climates. The county will need to rely mainly on outlying farms for non-food essentials as well, such as oilseeds, flax, hemp, wool, leather, and wood.

Because the agriculture of the future will need closed nutrient cycles, fertility for all county food production cannot be considered apart from county organic waste streams.[vi] To maintain fertility, organic waste must return in some form to food production sites. As the dense urban population produces the bulk of the waste, public institutions will need to take responsibility for separate collection of the purely organic component of the urban garbage and sewage waste streams, recycling part of it back to rural farms.[vii]

Fertility in urban and peripheral agricultural soils can be sustained with compost from the city organic garbage stream alone. A study of one urban community revealed that urban agriculture alone could absorb 20% of the organic waste production of the city.[viii] This will require a municipal policy and program of careful triage, collection, and composting at optimum C/N ratio by mixing high-nitrogen food garbage with high-carbon sources like leaves and shredded paper trash. The city could assign responsibility to urban institutional sources, such as schools and restaurants for moving their large organic waste streams to composting facilities at specific peri-urban food production sites. A map of existing Tompkins County composting sites demonstrates the composting potential (Figure 3).[ix]

Figure 3. Composting sites in Tompkins County (click image to enlarge)

As for sewage, eventually Ithaca will have to desewer, converting to urban night soil collection, biogas extraction, and the recycling of residual organic matter to county farms that will be necessary to maintain the mineral content of rural agricultural soils. In the short run, guerilla humanure composting from backyard compost toilets can build toward full conversion (Figure 4). These household facilities are satisfactorily self-policed, because the product will be used in closed-cycle residential food production.

Figure 4. A functioning home-built composting toilet based on a 55 gallon drum that has been in operation in Cortland County since 1983. The drum is periodically rotated out through a composting cycle

Conclusion

In this article I discussed the possibility that some of the current massive importation of the county’s food consumption could go on for decades. I pointed out serious risks to food security if this were allowed to continue, and argued that the distance economy in food causes metabolic rifts that make it ultimately unsustainable. I described in outline how a local food production system could mend the biological rift. Detailed visions of urban, peri-urban, and rural food production systems in the next articles will explain design solutions to the basic problems of fertility, energy, water supply, and pest control in specific cases of each type of production. And the reorganization of county agriculture itself will begin to address the most challenging rift, the social and cultural rift between urban and rural life.

[i] Hedrick, Ulysses Prentis. A History of Agriculture in the State of New York. Albany: New York State Agricultural Society, 1933.

[ii] Ibid.

[iii] Martenson, Chris. http://www.chrismartenson.com/crashcourse

Heinberg, Richard. Peak Everything: Waking Up to a Century of Declines. Gabriola, BC : New Society Publishers, 2007.

Kunstler, James Howard. The Long Emergency. New York : Atlantic Monthly Press, 2005.

[iv] The earliest to apply the term metabolic rift to the “robbery” of country soils through the exportation of food to cities appears to have been the German chemist Justus von Liebig in the introduction to the seventh edition of his Organic Chemistry in its Application to Agriculture and Physiology. The term was later used by Karl Marx and others. See Foster, J.B., “Marx’s ecology in historical perspective,” http://pubs.socialistreviewindex.org.uk/isj96/foster.htm and Clausen, Rebecca, “Healing the Rift: Metabolic Restoration in Cuban Agriculture,” Monthly Review, May 2007.

[v] Community Food Security Coalition. “Urban Agriculture and Community Food Service in the United States: Farming from the City Center to the Urban Fringe.” FoodSecurity.org. October 2003. http://www.foodsecurity.org/PrimerCFSCUAC.pdf

[vi] For information about local waste processing facilities, see the TCLocal article “Wasting in the Energy Descent: An Outline for the Future” by Tom Shelley, http://tclocal.org/2009/01/wasting_in_the_energy_descent.html

[vii] Tom Shelley has recently begun to prototype this process with “The Sustainable Chicken Project,” which returns nutrients to the land by collecting kitchen scraps in the City of Ithaca on a subscription basis and feeding them to chickens at Steep Hollow Farm three miles outside the city in the Town of Ithaca. See http://www.sundancechannel.com/sunfiltered/2010/01/sustainable-chicken-project/ and the farm’s blog at http://steephollowfarm.wordpress.com/

[viii] Mougeot, Luc J.A. Growing Better Cities: Urban Agriculture for Sustainable Development. Ottawa: International Development Centre, 2006. http://www.idrc.ca/openebooks/226-0/

[ix] http://www.co.tompkins.ny.us/gis/maps/pdfs/CompostMap2000-E.pdf

Topics: Agriculture, Northland Sheep Dairy, Core Ideas, Social Futures, Peak Oil, Relocalization, Sustainability Assessment Tools, Uncategorized | No Comments » |

Through the Looking Glass: Adventures in Landgrant Land

By Karl North | February 27, 2010

Through the Looking Glass: Adventures

in Landgrant Land

-         Karl North, 5-09

“If Alice were reborn in these times, she would not need to step through the mirror; it would suffice that she lean out the window.” – Eduardo Galeano

Once upon a time in a faraway empire, a land so prosperous it overflowed with gmo milk, high fructose corn syrup, soyaburgers, and several thousand brands of breakfast cereal, there thrived a great university on a hill, its gothic arches draped with ivy, and its graduate schools swarming with the cream of intelligent youth lured from the elite classes of lesser nations.

On this fount of learning and knowledge the emperor had bestowed a great honor and duty: in return for the gift of land from the common wealth[1] on which to erect its halls and towers, the institution’s sages and sorcerers pledged to minister to the welfare of all the peasantry of the surrounding province. Thus it earned the title of “landgrant university”.

One of the deeds that launched the reputation of landgrant sages throughout the realm was to work a spell on a golden grain developed by earlier peasant tribes (see footnote), that reduced its many varietal adaptations to a single form, which they called “high bred corn”, because it allowed the feudal nobility to take control of the seed. Claims (later proven to be unfounded[2]) that this alchemy was the only way to raise yields led to its adoption everywhere, replacing the previous genetic diversity and making the golden grain extremely vulnerable to sweeping plagues. The magical method that produced this great invention, now known as ‘reductionist science’, became the hallmark of landgrant sorcery and the template for scholarly work in every corner of the realm.

With the passage of time the university grew richer and gained numerous new fields of study and architectural anomalies, but the peasants grew poorer with every brilliant new tool the scholars devised to help them grow and harvest their crops. A small band of the most unruly peasants, known throughout the province as the ‘organos’ began to reject the teachings of the landgrant, and vowed to build a new way of thinking about the land and its cultivation. United around the motto, “Feed the soil, not the plant!”, they soon would have nothing more to do with the scholars in their towers.

By happenstance one of the more fractious farmers in this breakaway faction was himself a recovering would-have-been academic, so was somewhat schooled in the exotic rituals and dialects of the university. One day, out-standing in his field, tending his flock, and ruminating on the ills of the world, he mused, “What a waste of grey matter is cloistered in yonder ivory towers. I hear some of its scholars are looking for a new way of doing science. Even there is talk among them of ‘stakeholder accountability’, which in peasant dialect means simply ‘living up to their pledge’ to us rural folk. Perhaps my fluency with the folkways of academe might be of use to breach the rift.”

So he set about recruiting a few of the more unconventional peasants and scholars to a learning community that, convening on neutral ground, would begin dialogue and work toward a new tradition of science. Initially this effort failed abysmally. Scholars would make no time for a project that might only put an ugly dent in their career path, and were loath to leave the cozy intellectual security of the ivory tower, even for lunch. Presaging the sages, key organos refused to participate on grounds that the magical magnetic field of reductive science would, like a strange attractor, hold the scholars in thrall, and preclude attainment of neutral ground in any meaningful way.

In those days the university’s ruling directorate, feeling a tickle of pressure from the peasant masses, decided to create a chair of sustainable agriculture to make over their image to a shade of green. Not wanting to really change anything, they chose a professor who professed no competence to teach or do research in the field. He made a perfect choice for the sinecure, being a likeable and well-meaning bloke whose long career in administration had taught him never to rock the boat.

Not wanting to admit failure, the fractious peasant submitted to an unhealthy alliance with the new purported scholar of sustainable agriculture, who agreed to recruit peers from his list of likely academic suspects, to lend his secretary to administer the project, and even to fund a monthly free lunch, provided that meetings occurred on campus.

Christened SALSA, or Stakeholder Alliance for Landgrant Science Accountability, the group met for two years and engaged in such trivial pursuits as facelifting the university with a revival of its ancient visionary, Liberty Hyde the Bailiff, and disputing the value of the university’s floating lettuce factory. Resistant to proposed reading outside the cozy bounded rationality of their disciplines, the sages persistently refused to discuss even the meaning of sustainability, claiming it could not be defined, but really fearing its lure toward subversive territory. Organo participants, smelling an attempt to put an organo face on junk alchemy, began to desert the learning community in disgust, and conflict ensued, revealing institutional loyalties that trumped free academic inquiry. The project ended suddenly when the sponsor surreptitiously ended the administrative support, and the free lunch. The peasant organizer, having retreated to his agrarian idyll, could be found again standing out in his field, often ruminating (with his flock) on the old folk adage, “There is no Free Lunch”.

As for the landgrant, it flounders on, a wounded dinosaur suffering the increasing slings and arrows of changing times in its declining, faraway empire.

[1] Actually this land and most of the land in the realm was expropriated from earlier tribes of peasants by the paleface invaders who then herded the original landholders into strategic hamlets on the most barren lands controlled by the empire. This strategy worked so well that it was used to subdue rebellious native peasant populations in all subsequent imperial conquests.

[2] The Political Economy of Hybrid Corn, Jean-Pierre Berlan and R.C. Lewontin, Monthly Review, July-August, 1986.

Topics: Political and Economic Organization, Social Futures, Peak Oil, Relocalization, Uncategorized | No Comments » |

Visioning County Food Production – Part Two

By Karl North | February 15, 2010

General Problem Areas in Sustainable Agricultural Design

In Part One of this series, I noted that providing for the local food needs of urban populations requires a design that integrates three overlapping categories of production systems: urban agriculture systems (many small islands of gardening in the city center), peri-urban agriculture (larger production areas on the immediate periphery), and rural agriculture (feeder farms associated with village-size population clusters in the hinterland of the city but close enough to be satellite hamlets). In this month’s article, I will discuss four key issues that must be addressed in order to envision these three systems: fertility, energy, water, and pest control.

As I portrayed it in the article that serves as an introduction to this series, “Invisible Ships and Boiling Frogs: The End of Industrial Affluence”, the era of energy descent that we are now entering will be one of economic shrinkage, at least partial de-industrialization, and the gradual end to industrial forms of farming. Under these conditions, the farming systems that provide the best solutions to the four issues under consideration will have one salient design characteristic: species diversity. In short, agriculture will incorporate multifunctional species to provide not just food but essential ecological services to address these key requirements of farm production, and will gradually replace the current agriculture that substitutes external inputs to solve these problems.

Some of the most durable and productive low external input farming systems in history are designed around animals that can accelerate the growth and conversion of plants to fertilizer. Because they are highly multifunctional, ruminant mammals rank highest among these. Beyond their manure production function, they can consume fibrous perennials unusable for human food. These perennials can grow on hill land too rocky or too erodable for many types of food cropping. Used as work animals, ruminants multiply the energy input from human labor many times. They provide a source of concentrated protein food that can be conserved and stockpiled for winter consumption. They provide hides and fiber for clothing as well. Cattle, sheep, goats, alpacas, llamas and bison are ruminants that we can most easily use in agricultural systems in our environment.

A few other animals serve some of these functions and, properly integrated, often are found enhancing these systems. Non-ruminant grazing animals like horses and mules are excellent components of a farm fertilizer factory in addition to their provision of draft animal power. Pigs and poultry can do the hard labor of turning manure into compost, and can thrive by consuming unused and pest species as well as waste streams from farms and kitchens. They both can reduce a patch of weeds to bare ground ready for planting, and pigs will perform tillage as well. They will consume crop residues and garbage from food preparation, and convert it to fertilizer as well as their own production as food animals. Poultry will consume weeds and insect pests. Edible fish and other water animals like frogs and snails can perform the same functions in aquatic systems. This map of flows among components demonstrates the potential of integrated systems (Figure 1). Notice that the flows may go in both directions among all components.

1. Soil Fertility

As energy descent deepens, two key fertility crutches of industrial agriculture will become cost-prohibitive. Synthetic nitrogen fertilizer production requires large quantities of energy. The decreasing quality of phosphate deposits is already driving up the price of phosphate fertilizer (up 700% in a recent 14-month period) and production is estimated to peak within 20 years.[1] Moreover, the affordability of most off-farm sources of fertility is contingent on cheap oil. But minerals essential to farm fertility can be recirculated within farms or at least within local food systems, and recirculation capacity will become essential to sustainable design of agroecosystems, as it is in natural ecosystems.

On-farm recycling. Building high levels of soil organic matter (SOM) will be central to agroecosystem design because SOM is key to achieving not only fertility goals, but also healthy water and mineral cycles, maximal photosynthetic energy capture and use, and optimal biodiversity. Humid, temperate environment soils are exceptional in their ability to store organic matter. French scientist Andre Voisin demonstrated 50 years ago that pulsed grazing (explained below) on permanent pasture is one of the fastest soil organic matter building tool that farmers have, at least in temperate climates like ours.[2]The structural element historically proven to work best in these environments is a grass/ruminant complex. This subsystem works on the principle that manure from a portion of the farm devoted to grazing animals will not only sustain the fertility of their forage land, but generate a surplus that will sustain a smaller acreage of annual crops (Figure 2). It can sustain fertility well enough to have generated numerous durable historical models around the world. The process was used in lowland northern Europe and New England before the industrial age.[3] Cuban research into its potential demonstrated the effective ratio of forage acreage to support cropland fertility to be 3:1 in that environment. In other words, the ruminant stock subsisting on 3 acres of forage produced enough manure to sustain both the fertility of the forage land and one acre of cropland. This conceptual model, adapted for environmental differences, provides a basis for system design here. Perhaps the most important design question for our purposes is the ratio of forage to cropland that is sustainable in our environment.

The full soil organic matter building process requires a design focus on three crucial areas of the agroecosystem:

Pulsed grazing is so important to the success of the soil building subsystem that it warrants an explanation in some detail. Pulsed grazing is a method of repeated grazing of paddocks in a pasture that controls stock density and timing of stock movement in and out of paddocks to maximize forage production over the growing season. This in turn maximizes manure production to build soil organic matter. Forage plants experience repeated pulses of growth and removal of biomass, both above and below ground, over the growing season. Key points :

Recycling from Human Communities. It should be clear from the integrated model (Figure 1) that solving the fertility problem must include repairing the broken nutrient cycle between human excreta and the land. If this seems an insurmountable challenge to modern urbanites, we need only recall from history that whole societies including large cities have managed excellent recycling of “night soil.” Among the numerous examples is China, where until the 1950s, 98% of the fertilizer used to grow food came from recycled and organic sources.[4] Relocalization of food production is necessary to reduce the cost of repairing this nutrient cycle. If Tompkins County exports milk products 200 miles to New York City, what will it cost to return the nutrients in the exported milk to our farmland? In a more county-based food system, methods for recycling humanure and other food garbage that are appropriate to urban, peri-urban, and rural farming sites are more feasible, and will be discussed in the sections devoted to these production systems.

2. Energy Capture

Ancient sunlight in fast-depleting, finite sources (oil, gas, coal) presently supplies over 80% of the energy used in the industrial form of agriculture that produces most of the food consumed in the United States. Natural ecosystems consist of food chains supported entirely by current sunlight, so it is easy to design farming systems to work the same way, as was done through most of agricultural history. Solar energy that is accessible directly on farms comes in forms that are far less concentrated than the fossil fuels that we are used to. Therefore we need to design farms that can be productive on far less energy. The challenge is to capture solar energy in as many places as possible as it flows through the agroecosystem. This can be accomplished by building into the farm food chain the diversity of useful species that I said was key.

The carbon cycle is an important way solar energy flows through our world. All metabolic processes in agriculture and other biological systems release carbon to the atmosphere. Tillage that stimulates activity in the soil food web, animal and human digestion and composting are examples. But criticism of these processes as feeding greenhouse gas build-up is mistaken. Biomass conversion to food, fertilizer, or fuel can be designed to be carbon-neutral over time because its emissions, unlike those of fossil fuels, are part of the biospheric carbon cycle. Agriculture can even be carbon-positive. The important question here is how to manage the carbon cycle to maximize long-term levels of soil carbon sequestered as soil organic matter. 

Animal Power. Currently (2011) people tend think of solar capture in terms of relatively high technologies like those that convert wind and sunlight to electricity. Working models exist of homesteads and even farms that are self-sufficient in electricity using small-scale equipment of this sort. However, most analyses of economic viability related to wind/solar electricity production at any scale are based on current costs in the manufacture and maintenance of these systems, all of which still rely on cheap oil. These analyses fail to account for already exponentially rising costs in raw materials and production of the equipment. All production costs of such technologies will rise in parallel with sharply increasing energy costs as the fossil fuel era declines. Like oil, many raw materials used in these technologies are finite resources already on the downside of their historical production curve; they will become unaffordable for many uses in the future. In sum, the window of opportunity that makes these alternative energy technologies approach economic viability now may close in the future as costs begin to rise more sharply. By some analyses, the window for a societal-scale transition to alternative energy has already closed. A 10kw wind-electric rig that can power a small farm costs about $70,000, and is usually economically unfeasible even today without subsidies. What will it cost after 15 years of rising manufacturing costs? What will it cost to replace it after its 20-30 year lifetime? And will any society in the energy descent be able to afford to convert to these alternatives on a significant scale?

There are ways of powering farm production that are more reliably sustainable. Just as the same breeze or brook flowing through a community might be tapped at a number of points for wind or hydropower to run a mill or pump water, solar energy can be captured to produce food or fuel by inserting species appropriately into the farm food chain. Apart from wind and flowing water, solar energy enters the farm ecosystem via photosynthesis in green plants, and flows through the system as one species feeds on another. Large herbivores tap immediately into this chain by feeding on plants that are too fibrous for food use. While they may produce food and fertility as previously described, they will do double duty as work animals in the future, thus replacing no longer affordable fossil-fueled machine labor.

Fields that grow the forages that support work animals and other grazing and foraging species will not compete with cropland. On the contrary, forage fields will provide an essential ecological service as the permanent cover necessary to sustain soil health on all sloping land. Present hillside cropland is always eroding and will be revealed as unsustainable when the crutch of cheap synthetic fertilizer is no longer available. This means that land use plans in hill country like ours will need to include a mosaic of hillside land in perennial forage and cropland on relatively flat areas. Unless terraced, the hillsides will be most erosion-free and productive when planned to mimic natural tree-dotted savannas, as hay/pasture that includes fruit and nut orchards, for example. The trees themselves will be multi-functional, producing food or forage, improving the cycling of soil nutrients, providing windbreaks, and shading the grazing animals.[5]

Integrated as described here, draft animals like oxen, mules, and horses will optimize the health and productivity of the agroecosystem.

Biofuels. Energy for winter heating and for cooking is almost as important as food production for survival in these latitudes. As much as possible of that energy should come directly from the sun, as in passive solar designs for both heating and cooking. But rural land use will need to reflect increasing local dependence on firewood for the rest. Sustainable forest management and harvest will again become a significant share of rural agricultural production, but will serve local urban and village communities instead of faraway paper mills. Forest conservation and reforestation should start with places that need to be forested for additional reasons, like ridge tops that protect water catchments, and hedgerows that serve as shelterbelts and browse for livestock.

Production of most other biofuels at any significant scale has been criticized as unsustainable on many counts. One that may prove sustainable is small-scale biogas generation on farms, because it extracts methane from some of the farm’s normal manure production before it continues in the farm’s nutrient cycling loop, as in Figure 1. Most attempts at biogas generation on US farms have been large-scale, high-technology projects aimed at fixing the pollution problem caused by industrial scale dairy farming. So far, farmer adoption of the expensive and complex equipment has been poor, despite subsidies. Meanwhile, small scale biogas generators aimed at producing light and cooking fuel in Third World peasant communities have proliferated, because they cost as little as $30[6]. Biogas production requires no separate biofuel crop that might compete with food production. Nor does it require inefficient distillation processes. For these reasons biogas production at an appropriate scale merits consideration as a way of capturing solar energy as methane fuel for limited use on farms and perhaps even surrounding communities.

3. Water Capture and Use

We live in a climate that is wet yet subject to droughts during the growing season. High productivity food production requires a constant water supply to cover these gaps. Maximizing productivity in the small areas devoted to urban agriculture is especially important, because of their high value in a relocalized food system. Sufficient water falls on urban areas and needs to be conserved there. Barrels can catch only a fraction of roof runoff, and will not be enough for the irrigation needs of a successful urban and peri-urban agriculture. Small water catchment ponds must become a normal part of both the public and residential urban landscape. Pavement runoff will need to be directed to the larger ponds, which might be located in parks and community gardens.

Rural agriculture will need more extensive water capture plans to hold and use water for farms and whole watersheds. Such a system should be gravity-fed, to avoid the increasingly high cost of pumping. An example is the keyline plan that traps some surface water in upper fields and directs the excess into strategically located irrigation ponds.[7]

Our irrigation needs in New York may be intermittent but still will require a lot of pipe and other delivery hardware when scaled up to cover all food production land. Rising costs of current irrigation delivery systems may become a limiting factor, forcing the invention of ones that use cheaper materials. This has been the experience in Cuba, whose year-round agriculture is heavily dependent on irrigation in its many months of dry season. Cuba’s artificially triggered ‘peak oil’ experience has been a bellwether and a source of lessons for the rest of the world.

Ponds will be needed to serve numerous purposes, as in Figure 1. Basins to process biodigester outflow and other organic liquid waste can grow high protein aquatic plants like algae and duckweed for animal feed, and then feed the cleansed water into ponds for fish and other aquaculture, as in the example in Figure 3. They will attract aquatic life including species useful for garden pest control, and enhance human quality of life as they beautify places and improve microclimates.

Figure 3 – Facilities for bioconversion using the UNU/IAS integrated biosystem at Montfort Boys Town, Suva, Fiji

Wetlands abound in New York and are among the most productive natural ecosystems. Because of their natural potential, they can be harnessed for highly productive agricultural use yet be managed to retain much of their natural function. Historical and contemporary models include wetland systems that fed older civilizations from the Aztecs to the Incas in Latin America, as well as many parts of Southeast Asia today. Typically, as in the Aztecan systems known as chinampas, farmers cut canals through the wetland and use the soil to create beds raised above the water level for agricultural use. The canal system is designed to allow the water control that keeps the raised beds well watered without being subject to undesirable flooding. Because of the ubiquitous water, these wetlands are highly productive as both agricultural and aquacultural systems. They produce so much biomass that they tend to maintain their own fertility, dredged from the decomposing detritus in canal bottoms.

One such wetland, adapted from lowland English agriculture, became the core of a highly sustainable agricultural system that supported the population of colonial Concord, Massachusetts for many generations.[8] The Great Meadow that traversed the village and all other nearby riverine flood plains was a swamp commons that was flooded in the Spring to deposit silt captured from cropland runoff, then partly drained and reserved for pasture and hay as it dried out during the growing season. As in parts of Europe, these well-watered riverine meadows produced enough livestock feed, livestock, and manure to sustain the fertility of the adjacent dry lands devoted to tillage agriculture. Figure 4 shows that already by 1650 careful allocation of land use had taken place on a functional level to sustain the whole system. Historical models like these suggest that we will want to regard modified wetlands as an important agricultural asset in the energy descent era.

Figure 4 – Concord, Massachusetts, 1652. From The Great Meadow: Farmers and the Land in Colonial Concord.

4. Pest Control

From a systems perspective, pest problems are ‘structural,’ hence best addressed by system design rather than treatment with pesticides. In this section I will summarize two main strategies addressed in order of importance: a focus on the food species themselves, and then the layout of the physical and biological environment as it affects these food species.

Much as health care in humans requires preventive medicine, we must grow healthy plant and animal species as a first step in pest control. A primary structural problem is the genetic industrialization of most agricultural plant and animal species, which was gradually achieved in modern times by breeding processes that prioritized productivity and short-term profit over other genetic traits, like hardiness. Moreover, relying on pesticides, even ‘natural’ ones, to protect these weakened subspecies inevitably fails over time because pests gradually adapt to conditions and treatments that become heavy-handed and routine. An example is parasite resistance in sheep, which has been neglected and lost. The resulting industrial breeds must be medicated so often that the parasites are gradually becoming immune to most medications. To be sustainable, food production systems will need to return to plant varieties and animal breeds that, while sometimes less productive, have more genetic defenses. By genetic selection farmers can rebuild hardiness in industrial breeds as well. Once called landraces, domesticated species for farming will once again have the resilience and close adaptation to specific sites that are essential to true sustainability.

The design of alternative environments uses three general strategies of pest control: luring or driving them away with trap or repellent species or physical barriers; creating species and habitats that attract ‘beneficials,’ species that prey on pests; and continually altering the environment with crop and animal rotations that shift them away from pests, thereby avoiding heavy build-up of pest populations in crop fields. This means that some areas of a farm may function mainly to provide these ecological services rather than food or fiber.

This last strategy points up a characteristic of the natural world that needs to be taken into account: it is always evolving. In the long run this means that pest control strategies can never be permanent, but must always be evolving to stay a step ahead of pests as the latter adapt to current controls. The downfall of industrial pest controls is their heavy-handed strategy of total pest elimination and routine medication. Ironically this creates the environments most conducive to genetic evolution in pest organisms toward immunity from controls. Moreover, implicit in the pesticidal approach to pest control is the false assumption of a static biological world that can be permanently altered with technology. This assumption itself stems from a flaw in the the dominant scientific paradigm, whose  reductive methods and resultant technologies reveal little concern over consequences beyond the short term.

Finally, recourse to medicinals and other treatments is a strategy of last resort, indicating a design failure in the production system, which eventually must be addressed.

Conclusion

From the foregoing it seems clear that life after fossil fuels will demand much internal reorganization of food production systems. Beyond that, to create a local agriculture that feeds the county, the map of rural and urban land use will change dramatically. In the countryside, wetlands and floodplains, hillsides, flatlands, and woodlands will have specific uses designed to maximize, while sustaining, the productivity of whole agroecosystems. Essential rural land use components might be:

  1. Hillsides in forage land sufficient to support cropland fertility.
  2. Flatlands in crop rotations.
  3. Wetlands and floodplains development and water management for high forage or crop production, in both agriculture and aquaculture.
  4. Sufficient forest for county firewood and basic construction needs, managed for maximum regenerative capacity, which requires fencing out livestock. Woodland regenerative capacity equaling 1 cord/acre/year is a common rule of thumb.

Many uses of city land will no longer be economical in the coming years. Land will need to be converted to food production and its supporting functions, like composting and water conservation. Prime candidates for conversion are the commercial strips now inhabited by national corporate chain stores. Private and public parking lots, which energy descent writer William Kunstler sees as soon-to-be-dysfunctional “missing teeth in the urban fabric,” are another example. During Cuba’s artificially triggered encounter with “peak oil,” public interest dictated that a better use of resources was to raze aging buildings to create urban garden space, rather than to restore them.

In the integrated system approach described here, the functions of plants and animals will undergo marked changes. The functions of many species to facilitate tight nutrient cycling, labor, and other services that underpin the health of the whole agroecosystem, will become more important. In the case of some animals, these functions will become primary, and food production will become a secondary function, with numbers of animals on farms directed to their primary functions. The result will be a general production system model that aims for maximum sustainability, remains within the carrying capacity of the natural resource base, and within that framework, feeds the maximum number of people per acre of land used.

[1] Peak Phosphorus: The Sequel to Peak Oil http://phosphorusfutures.net/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=16&Itemid=30

[2] Voisin, André, Grass Productivity, 1959. (English translation in 1988) Island

Publishers, Washington, D.C., U.S.A.

[3] Donahue, Brian. 2004. The Great Meadow: Farmers and the Land in Colonial Concord. New Haven:Yale University Press.

[4] http://www.fairviewgardens.org/pub_next_frontier.html

[5] North, Karl. 2008. Optimizing Nutrient Cycles with Trees in Pasture Fields. LEISA Magazine, 24 (2), March 2008. http://www.ileia.org/index.php?url=magazine-list.tpl&p[source]=ILEIA

[6] Preston, T.R. 2005.Biodigesters in Ecological Farming Systems. LEISA Magazine, 21 (1), March 2005.

Also: http://www.ruralcostarica.com/biodigester.html

[7] http://www.keyline.com.au/ad1ans.htm

[8] Donahue, op. cit.

Topics: Agriculture, Northland Sheep Dairy, Core Ideas, Social Futures, Peak Oil, Relocalization, Sustainability Assessment Tools, Uncategorized | 3 Comments » |

Visioning County Food Production – Part One

By Karl North | February 14, 2010

Visioning County Food Production

by Karl North

“Because energies and monies for research, development, and thinking are abundant only during growth and not during energy leveling or decline, there is a great danger that means for developing the steady state will not be ready when they are needed, which may be no more than 5 years away but probably more like 20 years”. – Howard T. Odum, 1973

This article is the first in a series. Papers in this series are being published at TCLocal, an organization devoted to writing about making different arrangements in human affairs in Tompkins County, New York, to address the problems of the post-petroleum era.

In this series I will attempt a preliminary vision of a relocalization of food production designed to feed the population of Tompkins County, New York. A project of this scope implies a reorganization of food processing and distribution that, while not included in this first iteration, will need to be integrated in a later, expanded overview.

My purpose is to explore the kind of local food system that will be needed as this country faces sharply lower access to the energy sources on which our present industrial form of agriculture and food economy heavily depends. I will describe the types of local farming enterprises, farming methods, resources, and land use needed to confront a future of much lower energy use. A documented baseline assessment of current food production and county resources is not an objective of this essay, but will be essential to a detailed planning effort. The picture presented here is intended to be general enough to be useful in planning the relocalization of foodsheds that include an urban center the size of Ithaca, New York.

Part One: Introduction

In these first few pages, I will set out my premises and theoretical points of departure in some detail to explain the fundamental changes in perspective I think are necessary to envision how and where we produce food in the future.

This vision will rely on several critical premises:

1. The premise underlying all work of TCLocal is that a permanent decline in the availability and affordability of liquid fuels and related rising costs of all energy sources will inevitably lead to much lower energy use and increasing importance of local scale in human affairs. The present long-distance food economy will shrink, and consumers will need to rely increasingly on local food production.

2. This ‘energy descent’ will force the transformation of food production toward low external input systems that rely more on human labor and models of healthy, highly productive ecosystem processes common in nature instead of the high energy cost technological substitutes on which agriculture, including most of organic agriculture, depends today.

3. Our world is systemic in nature (parts are more or less connected), and this has important implications for attempts to change it. Problems we want to solve are, as the system analysts like to say, ‘structural’, and require intervention in several places. So the single-issue approach to any kind of change is eventually bound to fail to meet expectations. For example, dieting to solve weight problems never works for long if the problem lies in the structure of our life. In addition to changing what we eat, maybe trading the car in on a bike and some tools to dig the lawn into a vegetable garden would produce better results. By itself, widening Ithaca’s commuter feeder roads like Route 13 will not solve the traffic problem; the improved highway only attracts more cars. But it might succeed if coupled with a county tax on car ownership, a tax hefty enough to pay for major improvements in public transportation. This would be intervention in the very ‘structure’ of the county transportation system.

Moreover, despite best intentions, in a systemic world we can never make just the one change we aim for. Complex systems are squishy like a balloon: squeezing just one end only makes the balloon blow out in other unexpected places. Change agents need a holistic approach that recognizes that consequences of any interventions are multiple ripple effects that go distant in space and time. This approach has important implications for design at every level of scale.

At the garden or farm scale we want to build in multifunctionality, where parts of the system serve more than one purpose. Plants and animals that provide food, for example, may also provide ecological services necessary for the health and productivity of the whole. Ecological services are the benefits arising from the functioning of the ecosystem, in contrast to purchased inputs.

At the level of the food system, where different elements of production, processing, and distribution can be designed as a cooperating whole, we need to build in complementarity as to what is produced, and services that are shared among the different types of production units to be described in this paper. Urban gardens may best serve the county food system by growing fresh produce, thus complementing rural farms that produce less perishable foods, for example.

At the community level, we need to view the reorganization of the food system as affecting and affected by the reorganization of all other infrastructure and institutions impacted by reduced energy availability, e.g., industry, housing, markets, transportation, sanitation, information flow, knowledge production, etc.

Most important from a systems perspective, we need to regard far-reaching changes like those to be proposed here as experimental, and track for unintended consequences in time and space. This approach, known to ecologists and other systems thinkers as adaptive management, requires constant monitoring and replanning in the face of uncertainty about consequences.

4. The design of a relocalized agricultural system will need to address root causes. For example, the proximate causes of flooding may be failed riparian buffers and levees, but the root causes are pavement, bare ground and other surfaces that create surface run-off, soils compacted and depleted of water-holding organic matter, agricultural field drains, and channeling that cuts streams and rivers off from their historic flood plains. Attention to root causes forces the need for the systems perspective outlined in premise #3. If, from the viewpoint of sustainability, high-input, oil-dependent agriculture is now revealed to be a design failure from the outset, little is gained by piecemeal solutions like replacing chemical inputs with ‘natural’ ones. Rather than the input substitution approach, efforts are better directed toward whole agroecosystem design that integrates a diversity of spatial and temporal elements.

Understanding Sustainability. In addition to working from the stated premises, I want to ground the proposals in this visionary project in a working concept of sustainability based on ecological science. This is important at this historical juncture for a couple of reasons. The common practice of confusing and conflating sustainable agriculture and organic agriculture will be counterproductive in the coming era when shrinking access to cheap energy will reveal the unsustainability of most current forms of agriculture, including organic. The flowering of the organic farming movement, in which I have been a practitioner for 30 years, generated much innovation that will be useful in coming years. But it also produced the delusion of a luxury version of sustainability, because it occurred in and was shaped by an era of cheap oil. Limited by economic forces and a focus mainly on environmental issues, organic farming became more a matter of substituting ‘greener’ inputs for those of industrial agriculture rather than seeking input independence through systematic redesign. Awareness that many of the ‘greener’ inputs depend on fast-depleting, often finite, soon-to-become-expensive resources still has not penetrated the organic movement sufficiently to become a paramount concern. A common practice in organic vegetable farming, for example, is to import fertility in the form of compost from factory-style dairy and poultry farms.

None of the above should be construed as an attack on the organic farming movement, or a dismissal of its contributions to the development of a truly sustainable agriculture. But we need a more rigorous design tool than ‘organic’ to select from those offerings.

Sustainability means that local food production systems must support the food and fiber needs of a given human population without exceeding their carrying capacity (CC). A working definition of CC might be the maximum indefinitely supportable ecological load of an ecosystem or area. And the ecological load is created by the size of the population to be sustained and its per capita resource use, often expressed as its ecological footprint.

We must be clear about what constitutes a supportable ecological load. Depletion of a finite resource like copper or phosphorus is not supportable unless we find a way to perfectly recycle as much of it as is needed (not downcycle it as in plastic bags → park benches → landfill). Petroleum products used for fuel are not recyclable, and anything needing those fuels in its production is therefore unsustainable. The supportable load on renewable resources on which we depend is limited to their refresh rate. The rate at which a farm consumes soil organic matter depends on the capacity of the agroecosystem to rebuild it. Less evident, but perhaps ultimately most important,is the load of work we place on natural systems to absorb concentrations of substances and handle imbalances that we create. That load can become insupportable, either because it becomes too great or because we weaken the ability of natural systems to do the work.

In short, the success and survival of all human activity rests on and must be subordinate to the continuing health of the natural resource base and the ecosystems that underpin it. Encapsulated in the phrase, “Mother nature bats last,” this means that any sacrifice of ecological health to advance human affairs eventually backfires in losses to society. Economic profit gained in the short term at the expense of the natural resource base and its health leads inevitably to economic loss in the long term.

The CC of a specific farm or regional landscape at a given historical moment may have eroded far below its potential. Industrial agriculture has indeed damaged the CC of much of the agricultural resource base. At present, technological props based on cheap oil have created a temporary, artificially higher CC that ecologist William Catton called “phantom carrying capacity.” [1] Continued belief in this phantom can prolong the overshoot and erosion of real CC long enough to cause the population to collapse.

Our present food system is operating at phantom CC. This is due to a level of agricultural productivity that is temporarily and artificially high because it relies on fossil fuels and other raw materials that are finite and fast depleting. Over 80 per cent of the energy on which our food system runs comes from oil. In practical terms this means 1) That we are feeding more people than is sustainable (at least on a global basis), because human populations have ballooned in response to rising food production, or 2) the consumption per person of some populations (like ours) is far in excess of what the planet can provide. Equitable food distribution is an essential response to the problem but is ultimately insufficient unless agriculture itself can be organized on a sustainable basis.

Finally, “needs of a given human population” is a slippery term, the definition of which varies widely from one culture to another. We need to ask: How much material consumption does our quality of life really require? In regard to food, does discretionary consumption exist which, if reduced, could allow agriculture to feed more people?

On the other hand, human intervention can often rebuild CC and possibly improve it somewhat. Effective agroecosystem design can improve farm sustainability, for example, by building in sufficient species diversity to provide necessary farm inputs and ecological services ‘for free’ to replace unsustainable external inputs to farms.

Despite the complexity of these questions, thinking about sustainable design to respect carrying capacity has effectively focused the attention of ecological scientists on maximizing the long-term health of four interrelated ecosystem processes in agroecosystems:

  1. The mineral or nutrient cycle
  2. The water cycle
  3. The energy flow
  4. The structure and interactions of the biological community

A focus on these four processes leads to the development of principles or attributes of sustainable agroecosystem design intended to maintain, or in many cases regenerate, the health of these ecosystem processes. Some of the widely accepted principles and their implications are:

These principles fit well with the design imperatives of a future marked by gradual loss of sources of cheap energy. Aimed at maximizing the ecosystem processes described before, these design principles will guide the visioning effort.

The visioning process will draw on several main resource areas:

From these resources I will attempt to extract and introduce a set of general food production system design strategies that follow principles already outlined above. Many of their elements have in common the goal of designing for food and other species that are multifunctional, delivering ecological services presently provided by the external inputs in our industrialized food system that will become prohibitively expensive in the future. Elements of these food system design strategies include:

1. Integration of crops and livestock

2. Animal, human- and small-scale wind, hydro, and solar as the primary energy sources of agricultural production

3. Perennial crop polycultures, in particular,perennial carbohydrate crops(nutritionally, hazelnuts can be seen as equivalent to soy, chestnuts as an equivalent to corn)

4. Perennial forage polycultures under intensive management (variations on an interdependent triad: grasses for bulk, legumes for nitrogen, deep-rooted broad-leaf forbs for minerals)

5. Agroforestry and sylvopastoralism

a. Alley cropping/grazing within perennial polycultures

b. Terracing, or return of perennials to erodable slopes

6. Intensive water management: capture and distribution swales, rooftop capture, microclimate creation, ponds and filter wetlands for storage, nutrient processing and aqua-ecosystem development

7. Extended growing season and harvest technologies

8. Intensive nutrient management

a. Repairing and tightening broken and leaky nutrient cycles: food = waste = food

b. Rotations that manage nutrient capture and use

9. Intensive bed growing

10. Biocontrol of pests: pest predator production and habitats, trap crops

11. Plant families designed for symbiosis

12. Stacked species for sunlight capture or shade or wind protection: vertical plant growth – vine crop fences, espalier

13. Cooperative management: neighborhood and community gardens, revival of the commons

Historical models of energy-efficient foodsheds that include an urban population suggest the need to design a whole that integrates three somewhat overlapping categories of production systems:

The design of each type of system will vary depending on its available resources, its appropriate role in feeding the county population, and its input support function for the other production categories. In parts two and three of this paper I will describe some general sustainable design considerations, and then build on them to offer a vision of each of these three food production systems. My effort is intended to build on earlier TCLocal articles relating to land use and food production. [6]

It bears pointing out that the reintegration needed to transform our food system will force the solution to some of our society’s worst problems. In addition to better food quality, the reduction of agricultural and other pollutants, and an increase in food security, the changes required for truly sustainable food production will rebuild community and begin to mend what Engels and Marx called the “metabolic rifts” in both our farms (e.g., broken nutrient cycles) and our communities (e.g., the broken connection between city and country, man and nature). These systems thinkers saw that the notion of metabolism that in biology refers to chemical processes and transactions essential to maintain life has its counterpart in ecosystems and social systems.

NOTES

[1] Catton, William R. Jr. Overshoot: The Ecological Basis of Revolutionary Change. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1982.

[2] Bennholdt-Thomsen, Veronika, and Maria Mies. The Subsistence Perspective: Beyond the Globalized Economy. London: Zed Books, 1999.

[3] Funes, Fernando et al. Sustainable Agriculture and Resistance: Transforming Food Production in Cuba. Oakland: Food First Books, 2002.

[4] Mollison, Bill. 1997. Permaculture: A Designer’s Handbook. Tyalgum, Australia: Tagari Publications, 1997. Examples: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bw7mQZHfFVE&NR=1

[5] Hopkins, Rob. 2008. The Transition Handbook. White River, Vermont: Chelsea Green Publishing, 2008.

[6] For a list, see the TCLocal archives (http://tclocal.org/archives.html).

Visioning County Food Production

by Karl North

Editor’s Note: This article is the first in a three-part series. Part 2 will appear next month.

In this paper I will attempt a preliminary vision of a relocalization of food production designed to feed the population of Tompkins County. A project of this scope implies a reorganization of food processing and distribution that, while not included in this first iteration, will need to be integrated in a later, expanded overview.

My purpose is to explore the kind of local food system that will be needed as this country faces sharply lower access to the energy sources on which our present industrial form of agriculture and food economy heavily depends. I will describe the types of local farming enterprises, farming methods, resources, and land use needed to confront a future of much lower energy use. A documented baseline assessment of current food production and county resources is not an objective of this essay, but will be essential to a detailed planning effort. The picture presented here is intended to be general enough to be useful in planning the relocalization of foodsheds that include an urban center the size of Ithaca, New York.

Part One: Introduction

In these first few pages, I will set out my premises and theoretical points of departure in some detail to explain the fundamental changes in perspective I think are necessary to envision how and where we produce food in the future.

This vision will rely on several critical premises:

  1. The premise underlying all work of TCLocal is that a permanent decline in the availability and affordability of liquid fuels and related rising costs of all energy sources will inevitably lead to much lower energy use and increasing importance of local scale in human affairs. The present long-distance food economy will shrink, and consumers will need to rely increasingly on local food production.

  1. This ‘energy descent’ will force the transformation of food production toward low external input systems that rely more on human labor and models of healthy, highly productive ecosystem processes common in nature instead of the high energy cost technological substitutes on which agriculture, including most of organic agriculture, depends today.

  1. Our world is systemic in nature (parts are more or less connected), and this has important implications for attempts to change it. Problems we want to solve are, as the system analysts like to say, ‘structural’, and require intervention in several places. So the single-issue approach to any kind of change is eventually bound to fail to meet expectations. For example, dieting to solve weight problems never works for long if the problem lies in the structure of our life. In addition to changing what we eat, maybe trading the car in on a bike and some tools to dig the lawn into a vegetable garden would produce better results. By itself, widening Ithaca’s commuter feeder roads like Route 13 will not solve the traffic problem; the improved highway only attracts more cars. But it might succeed if coupled with a county tax on car ownership, a tax hefty enough to pay for major improvements in public transportation. This would be intervention in the very ‘structure’ of the county transportation system.

dominoes come aroundMoreover, despite best intentions, in a systemic world we can never make just the one change we aim for. Complex systems are squishy like a balloon: squeezing just one end only makes the balloon blow out in other unexpected places. Change agents need a holistic approach that recognizes that consequences of any interventions are multiple ripple effects that go distant in space and time. This approach has important implications for design at every level of scale.

At the garden or farm scale we want to build in multifunctionality, where parts of the system serve more than one purpose. Plants and animals that provide food, for example, may also provide ecological services necessary for the health and productivity of the whole. Ecological services are the benefits arising from the functioning of the ecosystem, in contrast to purchased inputs.

At the level of the food system, where different elements of production, processing, and distribution can be designed as a cooperating whole, we need to build in complementarity as to what is produced, and services that are shared among the different types of production units to be described in this paper. Urban gardens may best serve the county food system by growing fresh produce, thus complementing rural farms that produce less perishable foods, for example.

At the community level, we need to view the reorganization of the food system as affecting and affected by the reorganization of all other infrastructure and institutions impacted by reduced energy availability, e.g., industry, housing, markets, transportation, sanitation, information flow, knowledge production, etc.

Most important from a systems perspective, we need to regard far-reaching changes like those to be proposed here as experimental, and track for unintended consequences in time and space. This approach, known to ecologists and other systems thinkers as adaptive management, requires constant monitoring and replanning in the face of uncertainty about consequences.

  1. The design of a relocalized agricultural system will need to address root causes. For example, the proximate causes of flooding may be failed riparian buffers and levees, but the root causes are pavement, bare ground and other surfaces that create surface run-off, soils compacted and depleted of water-holding organic matter, agricultural field drains, and channeling that cuts streams and rivers off from their historic flood plains. Attention to root causes forces the need for the systems perspective outlined in premise #3. If, from the viewpoint of sustainability, high-input, oil-dependent agriculture is now revealed to be a design failure from the outset, little is gained by piecemeal solutions like replacing chemical inputs with ‘natural’ ones. Rather than the input substitution approach, efforts are better directed toward whole agroecosystem design that integrates a diversity of spatial and temporal elements.

Understanding Sustainability. In addition to working from the stated premises, I want to ground the proposals in this visionary project in a working concept of sustainability based on ecological science. This is important at this historical juncture for a couple of reasons. The common practice of confusing and conflating sustainable agriculture and organic agriculture will be counterproductive in the coming era when shrinking access to cheap energy will reveal the unsustainability of most current forms of agriculture, including organic. The flowering of the organic farming movement, in which I have been a practitioner for 30 years, generated much innovation that will be useful in coming years. But it also produced the delusion of a luxury version of sustainability, because it occurred in and was shaped by an era of cheap oil. Limited by economic forces and a focus mainly on environmental issues, organic farming became more a matter of substituting ‘greener’ inputs for those of industrial agriculture rather than seeking input independence through systematic redesign. Awareness that many of the ‘greener’ inputs depend on fast-depleting, often finite, soon-to-become-expensive resources still has not penetrated the organic movement sufficiently to become a paramount concern. A common practice in organic vegetable farming, for example, is to import fertility in the form of compost from factory-style dairy and poultry farms.

None of the above should be construed as an attack on the organic farming movement, or a dismissal of its contributions to the development of a truly sustainable agriculture. But we need a more rigorous design tool than ‘organic’ to select from those offerings.

Sustainability means that local food production systems must support the food and fiber needs of a given human population without exceeding their carrying capacity (CC). A working definition of CC might be the maximum indefinitely supportable ecological load of an ecosystem or area.

We must be clear about what constitutes a supportable ecological load. Depletion of a finite resource like copper or phosphorus is not supportable unless we find a way to perfectly recycle as much of it as is needed (not downcycle it as in plastic bags → park benches → landfill). Petroleum products used for fuel are not recyclable, and anything needing those fuels in its production is therefore unsustainable. The supportable load on renewable resources on which we depend is limited to their refresh rate. The rate at which a farm consumes soil organic matter depends on the capacity of the agroecosystem to rebuild it. Less evident, but perhaps ultimately most important,is the load of work we place on natural systems to absorb concentrations of substances and handle imbalances that we create. That load can become insupportable, either because it becomes too great or because we weaken the ability of natural systems to do the work.

In short, the success and survival of all human activity rests on and must be subordinate to the continuing health of the natural resource base and the ecosystems that underpin it. Encapsulated in the phrase, “Mother nature bats last,” this means that any sacrifice of ecological health to advance human affairs eventually results in losses to society. Economic profit gained in the short term at the expense of the natural resource base and its health leads inevitably to economic loss in the long term.

The CC of a specific farm or regional landscape at a given historical moment may have eroded far below its potential. Industrial agriculture has indeed damaged the CC of much of the agricultural resource base. At present, technological props based on cheap oil have created a temporary, artificially higher CC that ecologist William Catton called “phantom carrying capacity.”1 Continued belief in this phantom can prolong the overshoot and erosion of real CC long enough to cause the population to collapse. Our present food system is operating at phantom CC. This is due to a level of agricultural productivity that is temporarily and artificially high because it relies on fossil fuels and other raw materials that are finite and fast depleting. Over 80 per cent of the energy on which our food system runs comes from oil. In practical terms this means that we are feeding more people than is sustainable (at least on a global basis), because human populations have ballooned in response to rising food production. Equitable food distribution is an essential response to the problem but is ultimately insufficient unless agriculture itself can be organized on a sustainable basis.

On the other hand, human intervention can often rebuild CC and possibly improve it somewhat. Effective agroecosystem design can improve farm sustainability, for example, by building in sufficient species diversity to provide necessary farm inputs and ecological services ‘for free’ to replace unsustainable external inputs to farms.

Finally, “needs of a given human population” is a slippery term, the definition of which varies widely from one culture to another. We need to ask: How much material consumption does our quality of life really require? In regard to food, does discretionary consumption exist which, if reduced, could allow agriculture to feed more people?

Despite the complexity of these questions, thinking about sustainable design to respect carrying capacity has effectively focused the attention of ecological scientists on maximizing the long-term health of four interrelated ecosystem processes in agroecosystems:

  1. The mineral or nutrient cycle
  2. The water cycle
  3. The energy flow
  4. The structure and interactions of the biological community

A focus on these four processes leads to the development of principles or attributes of sustainable agroecosystem design intended to maintain, or in many cases regenerate, the health of these ecosystem processes. Some of the widely accepted principles and their implications are:

  • Low external inputs - Input self-sufficiency.

  • Low emissions – Closed nutrient and carbon cycles that avoid losses of valuable resources that eventually cause environmental damage.

  • Stability – Resilience – Adaptive Capacity – These qualities of sustainability are all necessary, but since they exist somewhat in tension, there must be balance among them. Stability is the quality that produces reliable results and minimizes risk, but in excess, stability can become rigidity. However, a certain flexibility is required for resilience, which is the ability to rebound from sudden change like a dry period in the farming season. Adaptive capacity to respond to slower changes like a gradually invasive plant disease also requires flexibility. Reserves of material or energy, overlaps, redundancy, or other slack in a system provide that flexibility, but at the price of efficient use of resources.

  • Knowledge intensity – Reliance on technologies that are powerful but derivative of a narrow, specialist knowledge base will give way to a broader, more demanding knowledge of farms as complex ecosystems of interdependent species, a knowledge that enables the creation of biodiversity to capture synergies, to biologically control pests, for example.

  • Management intensity – Farming for input self-sufficiency and low emissions will require more labor devoted to management planning and monitoring to replace other resources or use them more efficiently to maximize sustainable yield: productivity/acre.
  • Local food self-sufficiency and national food sovereignty

These principles fit well with the design imperatives of a future marked by gradual loss of sources of cheap energy. Aimed at maximizing the ecosystem processes described before, these design principles will guide the visioning effort.

The visioning process will draw on several main resource areas:

· Known principles of agroecology and their relation to the concept of sustainability as outlined above;

· Historical knowledge of how production was achieved before the era of cheap energy and other inputs – as late as the early 20th century in some locations;

· Subsistence and semi-subsistence farming systems in agrarian communities on the periphery of the global industrial economy, which have managed to escape the imprint of the current system2;

· Contemporary models of large-scale conversion from industrial agricultural systems to localized, low input agricultural systems as in Cuba3, the resources of the Permaculture4 and Transition Towns5 movements, and some of the more sustainable design efforts to develop very low external input systems in the organic agriculture movement.

From these resources I will attempt to extract and introduce a set of general food production system design strategies that follow principles already outlined above. Many of their elements have in common the goal of designing for food and other species that are multifunctional, delivering ecological services presently provided by the external inputs in our industrialized food system that will become prohibitively expensive in the future. Elements of these food system design strategies include:

  1. Integration of crops and livestock

  1. Animal, human- and small-scale wind, hydro, and solar as the primary energy sources of agricultural production

  1. Perennial crop polycultures, in particular,perennial carbohydrate crops(nutritionally, hazelnuts can be seen as equivalent to soy, chestnuts as an equivalent to corn)

  1. Perennial forage polycultures under intensive management (variations on an interdependent triad: grasses for bulk, legumes for nitrogen, deep-rooted broad-leaf forbs for minerals)

  1. Agroforestry and sylvopastoralism
    1. Alley cropping/grazing within perennial polycultures
    2. Terracing, or return of perennials to erodable slopes

  1. Intensive water management: capture and distribution swales, rooftop capture, microclimate creation, ponds and filter wetlands for storage, nutrient processing and aqua-ecosystem development

  1. Extended growing season and harvest technologies

  1. Intensive nutrient management
    1. Repairing and tightening broken and leaky nutrient cycles: food = waste = food
    2. Rotations that manage nutrient capture and use

  1. Intensive bed growing

  1. Biocontrol of pests: pest predator production and habitats, trap crops

  1. Plant families designed for symbiosis

  1. Stacked species for sunlight capture or shade or wind protection: vertical plant growth – vine crop fences, espalier

  1. Cooperative management: neighborhood and community gardens, revival of the commons

Historical models of energy-efficient foodsheds that include an urban population suggest the need to design a whole that integrates three somewhat overlapping categories of production systems:

  • Urban agriculture – many small islands of gardening in the dense city center

  • Peri-urban agriculture – larger production areas in the immediate periphery

  • Rural agriculture – feeder farms associated with village-size population clusters in the hinterland of the city but close enough to be satellite hamlets

The design of each type of system will vary depending on its available resources, its appropriate role in feeding the county population, and its input support function for the other production categories. In parts two and three of this paper I will describe some general sustainable design considerations, and then build on them to offer a vision of each of these three food production systems. My effort is intended to build on earlier TCLocal articles relating to land use and food production6

It bears pointing out that the reintegration needed to transform our food system will force the solution to some of our society’s worst problems. In addition to better food quality, the reduction of agricultural and other pollutants, and an increase in food security, the changes required for truly sustainable food production will rebuild community and begin to mend what Engels and Marx called the “metabolic rifts” in both our farms (e.g., broken nutrient cycles) and our communities (e.g., the broken connection between city and country, man and nature). These systems thinkers saw that the notion of metabolism that in biology refers to chemical processes and transactions essential to maintain life has its counterpart in ecosystems and social systems.

1 Catton, William R. Jr. 1980. Overshoot: The Ecological Basis of Revolutionary Change. University of Illinois, Urbana. Illini Books Edition, 1982.

2 Bennholdt-Thomsen, Veronika, and Maria Mies. 1999. The Subsistence Perspective: Beyond the Globalized Economy. Zed Books. London

3 Funes, Fernando et al. 2002. Sustainable Agriculture and Resistance: Transforming Food Production in Cuba. Food First Books. Oakland, California.

4 Mollison, Bill. 1997. Permaculture: A Designers Handbook. Tagari Publications. Tyalgum, Australia. Examples:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bw7mQZHfFVE&NR=1

5 Hopkins, Rob. 2008. The Transition Handbook. Chelsea Green Publishing. White River, Vermont.

6 For a list, see the TCLocal archives (http://tclocal.org/archives.html).

Topics: Agriculture, Northland Sheep Dairy, Core Ideas, Social Futures, Peak Oil, Relocalization, Sustainability Assessment Tools, Uncategorized | No Comments » |

Economics as brain damage

By Karl North | February 4, 2010

Economics as Brain Damage*

Karl North 2004

On the first day of my first formal introduction to economics as an undergraduate, the professor defined the discipline as the scientific study of the distribution of scarce resources. But the course from then on was concerned only with such matters as market variables like supply and demand, and market mechanisms like price and interest rate. Although I learned that the course was typical of American introductory economics courses, I was confused and disappointed with it, but could not at the time articulate why. As American popular culture tends to subsume the dominant themes of its intellectual culture, so my enculturation until then gave me few clues about what bothered me about the course. The following year I spent in France as a student at the University of Paris. I studied political economy, took part in massive demonstrations against French colonial domination of Algeria, and was able to read in the European press about economic events, patterns, structures, and empires interpreted from a wide range of points of view. All of this was (sadly) new to me, and enlightening, and it finally hit me like a ton of bricks what was wrong with American economics.

Economics, as my undergraduate professor defined it the first day, claimed a particular territory in the realm of human experience for uninhibited scientific study. But instead of a wide-ranging inquiry into the various ways humans have organized (or could organize) the distribution of scarce resources, and how this distribution affects the distribution of power and other impacts that might concern members of society, the professor offered only vocational training: the study of the peculiar political economy of the United States (a market economy driven largely by private capital), and of only those aspects of the system that would be most useful for people pursuing the limited goal of succeeding in business. And by defining this tiny piece of the social science pie as “the science of economics” the professor was adding a huge dollop of ideology.

Why? Because, as any anthropologist knows, in virtually all of the many millennia of human history, societies practiced a wide variety of ways of organizing access and distribution of scarce resources, and none of them evolved the type of organization that began to appear in the last few centuries: a regime of values where the value of everything depends on its market price, where use-value surrenders to the stamp of commodification, where everything material and even ideas become ‘property’, and where even hold-out niches to protect such relics as ‘family values’ eventually succumb to market fundamentalism. Why elevate the study of this apparent aberration to the status of ‘science’? Why not devote economics to designing alternatives to this temporary misstep in human creativity?

Well, economists will have no truck with such subversion of their discipline. To protect its heavy ideological foundation, neo-classical economists have erected an intellectual firewall between their discipline and the rest of social science to preclude such contaminations as the analysis of class and power. Although in the forty years since my experience with ‘Economics 101’ I have been an avid amateur student of economic knowledge, I have learned nothing to disabuse me of the notion that economics as taught in the United States is mostly vocational training and ideology.

But why brain damage? After all at least the vocational training part has some positive use, however limited to short term business needs. To understand the problem, we need to consider the aims of a liberal education. For that is the context in which to properly evaluate any general introductory course in any discipline. A liberal education is generally thought to be education for life, and for informed citizenship. That is what the institution that offered my economics course claimed to provide, at a current undergraduate diploma price of over $100,000, like others of a small group of top-ranking schools focusing on undergraduate education. It is one thing for a business school to teach the economics of a market economy where private capital makes or influences many of the decisions that affect people’s lives. For there one expects a narrow vocational approach. To offer the same course as education for life is more like indoctrination. Moreover, to teach (by exclusion) that this is all there is to a science of economics is brain damage.

*title phrase courtesy of Hazel Henderson, renegade North American economist

Topics: Political and Economic Organization, Recent Additions, Social Futures, Peak Oil, Relocalization, Sustainability Assessment Tools | No Comments » |

A sustainable agriculture research and education agenda to address a gathering crisis

By Karl North | January 31, 2010

A Sustainable Agriculture Research & Education Agenda to Address a Gathering Crisis

Karl North 2002

The Crisis, in its multidimensionality, with likely multiplier effects across its elements:

  1. Exponentially rising energy costs for coming decades as currently foreseeable alternative energy technologies fail to compensate for the end of cheap oil;
  2. Gradual loss of most of the energy-intensive inputs that currently prop agricultural productivity and mask the degraded state of most farmland. Present low agroecosystemic potential stems from decades of damage to its natural capital: the biodiversity and health of mineral, water and carbon cycles that provide essential ecological services.
  3. Increasing water shortage for the irrigated deserts that currently supply large proportions of the food economy;
  4. Accumulation of persistent organic pollutants, degradation of genetic traits of sustainability in most agricultural plants and animals, homogenization of gene pools and extinction losses, all of which undermine capacity to build a sustainable agriculture at a pace the situation calls for;
  5. Increasing weather volatility, a near term impact of climate change;
  6. Increasing agroecosystem instability, a long term impact of climate change;
  7. Increasing economic crisis in the United States as federal debt, consumer debt, and trade deficit approach a tipping point;
  8. A declining domestic economy as the empire tries to salvage with military control what it is gradually losing in global economic hegemony.

The Agenda

To address the crisis, a research and education agenda must first free itself from two current limitations:

The guiding principles of research and education programs must include:

  1. A scientific perspective based on the understanding that sustainability pertains only to systems, not isolated practices. Hence evaluation of a practice becomes a function of its ability to enhance sustainability in a specified systemic context.
  2. A comprehensive systems methodology, using the tools of modeling and simulation of complex system designs and scenarios that modern computer power affords. These tools permit long term simulation of the complex dynamics that system feedback structures generate, when actual long-term experimentation is too costly.
  3. Agroecology as its scientific basis and the core of the training program, not current departmental traditions, narrow in perspective and corrupted by a devotion to production agriculture designs that mainly serve a capitalist financial class.
  4. Methods of whole system evaluation of progress of the model toward sustainability, methods that reveal the interdependence of progress in the various indicators of sustainability. Examples are in use in Latin America. See my paper Monitoring Farms for Progress toward Sustainability for an introduction to one of these.
  5. An approach that gradually aims toward zero external input, zero emissions designs, to replace a high input agriculture that will suffer permanent decline with the end of the cheap energy economy.
  6. An approach that models a much higher farm self-sufficiency in the production of energy, fertility, seed, pest control and other major inputs than is currently economically viable on any commercial farm.
  7. Full utilization of regional biodiversity potential including multi-species animal and microbiological integration, and intensely polycultural cropping designs including wild and edge effect habitats.
  8. An invitation to greater farmer/consumer collaboration in model and project design and execution than any current effort.

Topics: Agriculture, Northland Sheep Dairy, Recent Additions, Social Futures, Peak Oil, Relocalization, Systems Thinking Tools | No Comments » |

Introduction to Systems Thinking

By Karl North | January 21, 2010

A New Understanding of Root Cause—

Systems Thinking for Problem Solvers

By Karl North

“We’ll never be able to go back again to the way we used to think.” – anonymous holist

A Revolution in the Making

The insight that the world functions in complex, interdependent wholes drives a growing revolution in the way people are examining, understanding, and trying to manage our affairs in the world. We can find evidence far back in human history of attempts to comprehend how these wholes function.

Early glimmers of awareness of the ever-present feedback that ultimately drives what happens in the world come down to us from biblical maxims like “As ye sow, so shall ye reap”, and reveal themselves in common sayings like “What goes around, comes around,” “chickens coming home to roost,” and in the lessons of folktales. But as the scientific revolution gathered steam in the last two centuries, its goal of accurate prediction reduced its focus to pieces of wholes, and reduced its products to explanation of events and short-term causes.

Only lately have scientists, seeing the inadequacy of methods bounded by these disciplinary traditions, seriously sought more holistic ways of doing science. These efforts, described variously as ‘systems thinking’ or ‘complex systems science,’ are still small and have encountered plenty of resistance in the scientific community. In the words of one holistic scientist, “You can always tell the pioneers – they’re the ones with all the arrows sticking in their backs!” But they are creating powerful analytical tools that amount to a breakthrough in how science is done.

In the early seventies scientists used one of these tools, known as system dynamics (SD) to build a global model of what is causing the main threats to human civilization: unsustainable resource use, pollution, exponential population growth, and inequitable distribution of goods and services. Simulating various scenarios (superficial change, fundamental change, no change), they found none but the most difficult to carry out would prevent global overshoot of planetary carrying capacity, leading to at least some degree of collapse of present human populations and quality of life during the 21st century. Published under the title Limits to Growth, it became an international best seller and put the science of system dynamics modeling on the map. Quickly the model came under heavy fire from those in the scientific community who have a vested interest in older ways of doing science. Even louder criticism came from groups who have a financial interest in maintaining an economic system structured for endless growth. Nevertheless, republished several times with only minor revisions, the model has vindicated itself as the disturbing outcomes it pointed to over thirty years ago have so far come to pass. Today a consensus has emerged among top scientists of many nations that we need to take seriously the possibility of a global future that resembles one of the scenarios in Limits to Growth.

A New Tool

One of the most difficult skills in holistic decision-making is learning to visualize and plan for both short and long term consequences. We are foiled first by our seemingly built-in desire for immediate gratification, and second by the increasing difficulty of visualizing consequences that arrive later in time and more distant in space from our problem focus.

A second major obstacle in holistic decision-making derives from the limitations of looking for a root cause. Certainly it is good to search beyond proximate causes to find underlying ones. But burrowing beyond symptoms of problems, we often find not a root cause but a bewildering set of causes. Could the idea of one root cause be misleading us as to how wholes really work?

Systems science has created conceptual tools that can give us the understanding of causality that we need to get beyond ‘root cause’ and even come to grips with long-term effects.

Picturing Systems

Wholes are like icebergs in that for many people the greater part of the system remains beyond their perception. Everyone can see events, although not always the most important ones. When the stream of events begins to reveal patterns of behavior, we need to pay attention, for these patterns are far more instructive than events. Most people can discern some patterns in space and time, but are not very good at it. The next deeper level, systemic structure, refers to the architecture of causal relationships that shape patterns of behavior.

Perception of system structure is a skill holists need to learn because causal arrangements usually generate the patterns of behavior that concern us in the wholes we manage. We operate from mental models of how the system works, but they are often faulty. This confusion is partly because our mental models are invisible, and partly because the linear, written language that has shaped much of our thinking distorts our mental models of how real systems work. In the real world, causality does not run in straight lines, as we shall see. Nor can we understand it piece-meal, as discrete sentences in our verbal language tempt us to do. We need a language appropriate to the task.

Developed in the US originally at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the conceptual tools of SD include a very simple, but powerful diagrammatic language of systemic structure that:

Understanding Patterns

The first step is to define any problem dynamically by creating a picture of how a problem behavior arose over time. For example, if we are a chicken farmer and our populations of chickens and eggs are growing out of control, we could describe that problem dynamically this way:

The second step is a simple way of drawing pictures that show in a glance the structures in our wholes that we think explain such problem behaviors. Known as causal loop diagrams (CLDs) in systems science, this tool is one product of the systems thinking movement that most anyone can learn. Used regularly, it can broaden holistic perspective.

When seeking causes of problems we see in the world, why do we often find not a root cause but an interlocking range of causes? System science reveals that we are not in error. In complex wholes, cause does not come from one place; it comes from variables linked in circles. Because a change anywhere in the circle feeds back to impact the point of origin, these circles are called feedback loops.

Thus, in a simple system consisting of chickens and fertile eggs, it is neither component, but rather the feedback loop, chickens-and-eggs, that is causing the system behavior—that stocks of both components grow exponentially over time. The one loop in our system example is called a reinforcing loop (R in the diagrams), because more chickens makes more eggs makes more chickens in escalating fashion. The feedback loops of the system (in this case only one) are its ‘structure’ and are what generates its ‘dynamics:’ what it does to the chicken and egg populations over time.

As any farmer knows, this simple system, structured as it is for exponential growth, would eventually overshoot the carrying capacity of its resource base and collapse. But systems science recognizes that there is typically another kind of feedback loop in most wholes, one that works to limit growth and stabilize the system. Chickens-and-roadcrossings is an example that might work in our simple demonstration system. The balancing loop (B in the diagrams) in this case is: more chickens tends to cause more road crossings, which in turn causes fewer chickens. By itself, this loop eventually leads to the end of the chicken population. But joined to the reinforcing loop, the system could generate the behavior the manager desires, depending on how the two loops are managed: which loop is allowed to become dominant.

Looking for Feedback

How do these revelations help us better understand the causes of problem behavior patterns we see in the wholes we must manage? From the SD perspective, the structure of all complex systems of every type and scale – the rumen food web of a cow, the soil ecosystem, the social network of a community or an enterprise, a local economy or a system of international relations, consist of sets of just these two types of feedback loops fitted together in many combinations.

Furthermore, it is this feedback structure that generates the long-term behavior trends in our wholes that we need to understand, and that humans have the most trouble grasping. So if we can begin to recognize and identify these two types of feedback in our wholes under management, some pulling, some pushing, we can do a better job of deciding where and when in this structure to apply leverage that will move the system in the direction we desire.

Understanding Cause & Effect

CLDs are ways to visualize linkages between important variables in your system where a change in one variable causes either a decrease or increase in another. The arrows show the direction of causality. So a change in the chicken population causes a change in the egg population. The signs (+, -) on the arrows have a special meaning, different from the usual one.

A plus (+) means that a change in one variable has an effect in the same direction on the other. Thus it means that an increase in the chicken population causes an increase in the egg population. And it also means that a decrease in the chicken population causes a decrease in the egg population. A minus (-) means that a change in one causes a change in the opposite direction in the other. So in this case it means that more road crossings tends to reduce the chicken population. And it also means that fewer road crossings implies a higher chicken population than there would have been had the number of road crossings stayed the same. All causal links effect change in either the same or opposite direction from the causal action.

As with causal links, feedback loops also occur in only two types, as mentioned earlier. To identify the kind of loop we must trace its causality around the entire circle. Starting with any variable, imagine either an increase or decrease, and trace the effect through all the elements of the loop. If a change in the original variable in the end causes an additional change of that same variable in the same direction, we call it a reinforcing loop (R) because it reinforces the original dynamic. More chickens means more eggs, which increases the chicken population even more.

If there are no balancing loops, a reinforcing loop will cause exponential growth (or decline) in all variables in the loop. If a change in the variable we start with leads to a change in the opposite direction, we call it a balancing loop (B) because it tends to counteract the original change. More chickens means more road crossings, which tends to reduce the chicken population (as chickens get hit by cars!).

Learning to see feedback structure and its consequences is not as complicated as it sounds. Like learning a musical instrument, it gets better with practice. An expanding branch of the SD network has taught elementary school children to diagram the feedback they experience in the wholes in their lives, and even to create simulation models on the computer where they can model the feedback structures in their lives and learn what consequences changes would have in the long term.

Once we see that cause and effect runs in circles, we can appreciate what a hash verbal communication makes of our understanding of system behavior, because it runs in straight lines (subject-verb-predicate), and rather too short ones at that. Then we can grasp the advantages of a diagrammatic language of circles and arrows that can communicate the dynamic, causal interconnections of all system components at a glance. This language is information dense, packing pages of prose into a single picture, and unlike prose, the language is unambiguous.

Anticipating System Surprises

Folktales like The Tortoise and the Hare reveal insights about the holistic way the world works. This folktale demonstrates the counterintuitive behavior that systems dynamicists say is an abiding characteristic of complex systems. We expect the hare to win the race, but it is the tortoise that wins. Many of our management and design failures happen because we fail to recognize system feedback structures that generate these surprising, unexpected results. Common examples of “fixes that fail” from unperceived feedback are:

In each of these cases, failure stemmed from an inability to identify feedback structures and anticipate how they would play out. And in every case, because of delays characteristic of feedback in complex systems, short-term success preceded long-term failure. This contrast between short- and long-term consequences of decisions has been one of the hardest things to learn about managing wholes. It needs more attention.

Parasite Problems

I said before that looking for the root cause gets us only part way to an understanding of the downstream consequences of decisions because we have been taught to perceive change in the world as unidirectional, where problems lead to actions that lead to permanent solutions. Building visual models that show all the important causal relationships that contribute to a problem behavior can get us much further. Let’s take the example of what decision would best control parasites in sheep.

Although we may have heard of disadvantages of medication, we are probably already doing it, so we use the “Five Whys” and decide that the root cause is that we are failing to medicate routinely. So we apply routine parasiticide treatments to the sheep and sure enough, it works. We can model the causal relationship this way:

The arrow shows the direction of cause and effect, and the sign (-) tells us that a change in the first variable causes a change in the opposite direction in the second variable. So if we decrease routine parasite medication of the flock, the parasite population in the flock will increase, all other conditions remaining unchanged. It also means that if we increase routine parasite use, the flock parasite population will decrease.

Since stepping up routine medication is expensive in materials and labor, the favorable effect of a decrease in the parasite population may lead some shepherds to eventually cut back again on the number of medications. We can model this response this way:

This shows that the original ramp up of treatment led to a response (reduced parasite population) that in turn prompted another response (reduced medication) in the same direction, thus reducing parasiticide use. This is the meaning of the plus sign (+). The final effect was to feed back and counteract the original action. For clarity we identify this feedback as a balancing loop (B), because it tends to set limits on any tendency to continually increase (or decrease) the level of treatment, as shown in the time graph.

Regardless of whether the balancing feedback behavior occurs, in every case other things are happening over time, which are important to understand. Increases in routine medication cause the parasite population to adapt with improved genetic immunity to the medication, leading to mounting flock parasite populations, and further increases in medication, creating a reinforcing feedback loop R1 (dotted lines) with its typical accelerating behavior over time in all variables:

We show that the genetic immunity occurs slowly by drawing a delay marker on the arrow (//). One might conclude that this is easy to understand without building a model, but the fact that shepherds, veterinary specialists, and the scientists who created the medication have managed to gradually destroy the efficacy of most sheep parasiticides by advocating or practicing routine use suggests otherwise.

Ramping up routine parasiticide use on the flock has another downstream effect. Because the flock is constantly medicated, the shepherd cannot tell which sheep are genetically most vulnerable to parasite infestation. Opportunities to select for genetic resistance decrease. So the flock becomes increasingly genetically addicted to the medication. Dependency causes higher parasite populations than would be the case without the addiction, all other things being equal. The end result is endless increases of medication levels, modeled in reinforcing loop R2 (dotted lines), also a loop with delays.

Furthermore, the model makes clear that feedback loops R1 and R2 have a multiplier effect on each other as they relate to management of the problem. All these effects are counterintuitive responses to the more routine use of the medication, responses that are not even mentioned in textbooks that teach livestock parasitism in graduate courses in major agricultural schools! The tragic end results for the sheep industry are gradually diminished genetic parasite resistance in most common commercial sheep breeds, compounded by an increasingly useless set of common parasite medications.

Seeing The Whole

Learning to build the causal loop diagrams that SD scientists have created as a learning laboratory can help us identify and understand the interdependencies in the wholes we manage. Sometimes they reveal things we want to avoid. Let’s build a diagram of problems visible in industrial agriculture to show how this works.

Suppose our problem focus is soil biological health, which we see deteriorating over time. This diminishes soil fertility, which induces increasing soluble salt fertilizer use, causing soil biological health to deteriorate even more. Here we have a classic reinforcing loop.

It facilitates good communication to give feedback loops labels that evoke the behavior they generate. I call this one Chemical Welfare/Warfare because these fertilizers have both an initial positive effect and a long-run negative one. I show one of the delays that generate this classic long-term/short-term effect. Can you add others?

To compensate for the declining crop health that accompanies salt fertilizer use, farmers increase pesticide use, with negative toxic effects on soil biological health. We depict this by adding another reinforcing loop I’ve called Chemical Rescue. Compaction and the practices that produce it bring two tilth loops into the picture. Finally, increasing dependence on chemical fertilizer leads farmers to neglect soil organic matter, so we add the Chem Replacement loop.

Eventually, diminishing returns and other accumulating problems, whose interactions are visible in the diagram, could strengthen a counteracting feedback loop of the type we saw earlier in chickens-and-road crossings. As it is a balancing loop, more agrichemical use leads after delays to less agrichemical use. It appears here alone only for clarity purposes. Can you integrate it with the full diagram?

The complete CLD shows how all the reinforcing loops containing the red variables have a negative impact on soil biological health, possibly with a multiplier effect, which is now more easily recognizable in the diagram than in a prosaic description. But it also shows how, by adding soil organic matter, these vicious circles can be reversed to become virtuous circles. Can you trace the causality to see how this works?

Feedback Structure Generates Behavior – Pogo’s Law

Characteristic of systems thinking is its focus on the patterned system behavior that generally arises out of the feedback loop structure of the system itself. Interactions among feedback loops, rather than specific variables, cause dynamic behavior (behavior through time). SD modeler Paul Newton calls this “feedback causality.”. External inputs or shocks simply act to trigger dynamic behavior latent in the feedback loop structure.

But our world consists of nested wholes, so where do we set the boundaries? A basic tenet of SD science is that the dimensions of the problem that interests us must guide our selection of the boundaries. This tenet directly contradicts the conventional wisdom of reductionist science: that the boundaries implicit in expert knowledge and its closely guarded turfs are useful in understanding how wholes function. If we want to know why big agriculture consumes family farms, it helps little to focus on farm or even watershed ecosystems and their processes. The system feedback structure that is generating the problem behavior—a shrinking farm population—lies beyond even the agricultural economy.

The historical pattern of big fish swallowing little fish occurs in every sector of our economy. So the boundaries of the system we need to look at to understand what causes this pattern encompass the whole economy, the political rules that govern it, and the knowledge and information institutions that shape people’s behavior in the whole society.

Boundary flexibility is a principle of systems thinking that is especially important in our society where compartmentalized scientific knowledge has created strong habits of boundary rigidity, with its resultant pattern of solutions that fail. Moreover, boundary rigidity often produces bounded rationality, where solutions that will fail actually are logical within the limited perspective of the problem solver. If I am sick and I believe that people in my village possess evil powers to cause sickness, then obviously I need to go witch hunting. If plants need nitrogen to create protein and nitrate fertilizer provides it and improves plant growth, why look at the problem further?

In stark contrast, the motto of the SD community: “Always challenge the boundaries!” is a directive to look critically at specialist knowledge flawed by research boundaries set by ideology, disciplinary convenience, or conventions of academic training. Thus systems thinking teaches an endogenous focus: to either look within the whole for the relevant causal structures or expand the boundary of our inquiry to encompass them. Whence the ring of the holist in Pogo’s famous challenge, “We have met the enemy and he is us!”

Causal Loop Diagrams can be a useful lens to help us view our wholes in action, and thus develop a whole new perspective on the world. I hope you will try drawing feedback structures to gain understanding of the problems in your lives. All it takes is pencil, paper and thinking cap. Learning to build visual models of the feedback structure that is generic to all social and biological systems can help decision makers:

This essay touches only the surface of the body of insights that the study of system dynamics can divulge, hopefully whetting your appetite for further exploration of the expanding science of the heretofore mysterious creatures that make up and structure our world, known in SD as complex, adaptive, self-organizing systems.

The systems thinking resources listed here include some that teach how to read and create causal feedback diagrams.

www.stewardshipmodeling.com The site of my mentor Paul Newton. He strongly believes in access to systems thinking at all educational levels.

http://www.globalcommunity.org/timeline/74/index.shtml#top A wonderfully non-technical essay, as much for the right brain as the left, by Donella Meadows, who was one of systems thinking’s shining lights.

http://www.clexchange.org/gettingstarted/msst.asp This is a good set of instructional materials.

http://www.clexchange.org/curriculum/roadmaps/ A more comprehensive curriculum.

http://www.exponentialimprovement.com/cms/uploads/ArchetypesGeneric02.pdf This paper is a good explanation of systems archetypes, which are very useful to learn to recognize because they explain problems that occur in a wide diversity of areas of life.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=izYx2Pi-t78 This video teaches you to use the free Vensim software to draw causal loop diagrams, as I used it in the paper.

Systems Thinking Basics, by Virginia Anderson and Lauren Johnson, 1997. Teaches the practical tools of systems thinking: behavior over time graphs and causal loops.

The Fifth Discipline Fieldbook, by Peter Senge et al, 1994. A manual of techniques, games, and stories to learn systems thinking (what Senge calls the ‘fifth discipline’).

The Fifth Discipline:The art and practice of the learning organization, by Peter Senge, 1994. An easy introduction to systems science and its application to the management of social organizations. Written for nonscientists.

Limits to Growth: The thirty year update, by Donella Meadows, Dennis Meadows, and Jorgen Randers, 2004.

References:

The chickens and eggs example herein, among others, originated in John Sterman’s book: Business Dynamics: Systems Thinking for a Complex World.

Topics: Core Ideas, Recent Additions, Systems Thinking Tools | 2 Comments » |

Two Folktales for Comprehending Late Stage Capitalism and its Scientific Culture

By Karl North | January 17, 2010

Karl North 2006

Folktales distill the wisdom of the ages. All too often their teachings are applicable to any era. Perhaps their continuing relevance comes, as the saying goes, from the human propensity to repeat history, once as tragedy, again as farce.

My favorite tales to explain the hilarious but tragic human behavior patterns of late stage capitalism[1] are The Sorcerer’s Apprentice and The Emperor’s New Clothes.

The Sorcerer’s Apprentice

This tale has been relevant enough to be reworked as novels, music, and poems from the time of ancient Greece to Faustian Europe, and was further immortalized in an early Disney cartoon-musical, Fantasia, where I first encountered it at the impressionable age of eight.

The tale begins as an old sorcerer departs his workshop, leaving his apprentice with chores to perform. The apprentice (Mickey Mouse in the Disney version) tires of fetching water for a bath or tank, and enchants a broomstick to do the work for him, using magic he is not yet fully trained in. However, soon the floor is awash with water, and he realizes that he cannot stop the broom because he does not know the magic word to make it stop. Despairing, he splits the broom in two with an axe, but each of the pieces takes up a pail and continues fetching water, now faster than ever. When all seems lost in a massive flood, the old sorcerer returns, quickly breaks the spell and saves the day.[2]

Modern science at the beck and call of high finance has created ever more powerful technologies whose primary goal is to maximize return to capital for an ever-richer investor oligarchy. Trumpeted to the public as a cornucopia of progress, these technologies initially appear true to promise. But like apprentice magic, they often bring tragic consequences in time. And there is no sorcerer to return, break the spell, and return everything to normal.

It is easy to conceive of a scientific establishment driven by different forces, ones that put public well-being of present and future generations before private profit. So the present situation isn’t a function of the nature of science, but rather of the nature of capitalism. Instead of surrounding us with piles of nuclear radiation, persistent organic pollutants, an asphyxiating transportation system, and industry that fouls the global nest with unrecyclable garbage, unsafe food, and an ever more degraded natural resource base, scientists, guided by the precautionary principle, could design technologies that are careful of the health of the systems on which our continued well being depends. But that would require scientific institutions structured to fit a holistic paradigm of scientific inquiry, where an understanding of the dynamics of systemic context sufficient to model ripple effects governs technology design. Unlike the primarily reductionist science practiced today, which fits hand-in-glove with the short-sighted goal of capitalist profit, a scientific community devoted to holistic design would take more seriously the reality that in complex systems, cause and effect are distant in time and space. For decision making in the real world, specialized knowledge is useless and even misleading without a way to gauge the consequences of decisions across broad interconnected wholes and much later in time.

Mickey the apprentice panics and chops his broom into pieces, which bloom into many brooms that only accelerate the flood. Likewise our scientific reflex is to put band-aid after band-aid on technologies that never were healthy or sustainable in their original design.

An example of reductionist science run amok is the current massive die-off of domesticated honeybees. Driven by the capitalist market economy, scientists have advised beekeepers to increase the size of bees, to increase productivity. Organic farmers who have regressed their bees back to a size developed in a long peasant tradition, do not experience problems.  Aiming for maximum productivity in isolation from other variables, scientists have genetically supersized most other domesticated plants and animals in agriculture as well, and with about the same results. The huge high production dairy cows of today are plagued with a well-researched constellation of problems, and would be uneconomical in an economy whose policy framework made the marketplace accountable for ecological and social costs.

The Emperor’s New Clothes

Many years ago there lived an emperor who was quite an average fairy tale ruler, with one exception: he cared much about his clothes. One day he heard from two swindlers named Guido and Luigi Farabutto that they could make the finest suit of clothes from the most beautiful cloth. This cloth, so they said, also had the special capability that made it invisible to anyone who was either stupid or not fit for his position.

Being a bit nervous about whether he himself would be able to see the cloth, the emperor first sent two of his trusted men to see it. Of course, neither would admit that they could not see the cloth and so praised it. All the townspeople had also heard of the cloth and were interested to learn how stupid their neighbors were.

The emperor then allowed himself to be dressed in the clothes for a procession through town, never admitting that he was too unfit and stupid to see what he was wearing. He was afraid that the other people would think that he was stupid.

Of course, all the townspeople wildly praised the magnificent clothes of the emperor, afraid to admit that they could not see them, until a small child said:

“But he has nothing on!”

This was whispered from person to person until everyone in the crowd was shouting that the emperor had nothing on. The emperor heard it and felt that they were correct, but held his head high and finished the procession.[3]

Today’s oligarchies wield the myth-spinning tools of modern empire so well that to date, few can see the naked truth as the child, and finally the multitude, did in the Hans Christian Andersen folktale. Like the believers in the invisible clothes of the emperor we accept a disneyland stage show in place of real democracy. We are repeatedly stampeded into wars by fake events and false information designed only for that purpose. We accept crumbs from the pillage of poorer nations in the false belief that our prosperity is only the product of American ingenuity, and bears no relation to the violence we inflict on the peripheries of the empire. We cling to the belief that elections put power into our hands when 5% of the people own 95% of the wealth. How can this be?

The incessant increase in elite wealth and power over more than two centuries has gradually structured government, media, education, and the knowledge business to serve the same needs as those of the tailors in the folktale: the manufacture of a mythical version of reality in the collective consciousness. Bred in the competitive world of advertising, a sophisticated industry devoted to the design of tools of mass deception has developed, which have become the preferred method of modern elite rule. The takeover of our minds happens so gradually that, like the frog in the slowly heating kettle of water, we never realize that our brains are slowly being boiled alive.

The brains of the scientific community are not immune from conversion to mush. In the USSR during the Stalinist era, the agronomist Trofim Lysenko oversaw the prostitution of genetics to serve ideological needs of the party, causing great damage to the progress of Soviet agriculture.

In the USA during the capitalist era economists and political scientists have presided over a similar great intellectual crippling of their disciplines to serve a dominant class of private capital holders. As a result of this American Lysenkoism, renegade economist Hazel Henderson calls training in the mainstream of her discipline “brain damage”.

Economists define their discipline as the social science that studies the production, distribution, and consumption of goods and services. As any anthropologist knows, in virtually all of the many millennia of human history, societies practiced a wide variety of ways of organizing access and distribution of scarce resources, and none of them evolved the type of organization that began to appear in the last few centuries: a regime of values where the value of everything depends on its market price, where use-value surrenders to the stamp of commodification, where everything material and even ideas become ‘property’, and where even hold-out niches to protect such relics as ‘family values’ eventually succumb to market fundamentalism.

Instead of a wide-ranging inquiry into the various ways humans have organized (or could organize) the distribution of scarce resources, and how this distribution affects the distribution of power and other impacts that might concern members of society, mainstream economics offers only vocational training for doing business in this peculiar economic system, and just enough science of market mechanisms to serve that goal and the broader political goals of the capitalist class.

Worse, a primary assumption of capitalist economics – that there are no limits to growth – ignores the laws of thermodynamics, as every physicist and ecologist knows. Rather than admit that material resources can be finite, economists manage to expand them endlessly in their imagination by indulging in a quasi-religious technological fundamentalism. Characteristic of this thinking is the argument in Nobel Prize winning economist Julian Simon’s book The Ultimate Resource that since the capacity of the human mind to solve problems is limitless (sic?), it follows that there are no material limits on humanity (sic!).

Why elevate the study of this apparent aberration to the status of ‘science’? When, like the child in the folktale, will enough people come forth to blurt out, “But the ‘science’ of economics has no clothes!”

Of late, Lysenkoism has taken root with a vengeance in biological science. Early in the development of the gene splicing method of genetic engineering, a few courageous scientists pointed to plentiful evidence that its underlying assumptions were false: genes don’t act alone (one gene on one protein) but in concert, and in complex interactions with environmental variables. Finally, over ten years too late, this inconvenient but unavoidable truth now has become so glaring that the establishment press had to acknowledge it A Challenge to Gene Theory, a tougher Look at Biotech (NY Times 7-2-07). An insatiable industry devoted to the commodification of life has sprung up based on the notion of one gene = one function, a typical product of reductionist science. The revelation that this assumption is false should logically bring down the whole industry and the patenting and privatization of genetic material based on it. But if the biotechnology industry continues to operate according to patterns of behavior characteristic of late stage capitalism, we can expect it to ignore this news.

[1] Capitalism as used here signifies a total social order that includes not only a characteristic political economy or policy framework, but also basic economic, governing, educational/scientific, and media institutions and cultural values distinctive of that social order.

[2] http://www.answers.com/topic/the-sorcerer-s-apprentice

[3] A synopsis of the Hans Christian Anderson tale

Topics: Core Ideas, Political and Economic Organization, Recent Additions, Systems Thinking Tools | No Comments » |

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