I've moved

Same topics but new location to express them. 

http://rchaardsblog.blogspot.com/

See you here 

Final Posting in this travel blog series

This is a duplication of a posting by Jeff Vail, from his blog, JEFFVAIL.NET.  Go to his original article for links to other articles in this series. 

This writing especially resonated with me and my own observations as my trip to Brazil was unfolding. This and the insight offered to me by Ben on this topic is perhaps the most valuable lesson I am bringing back to Northwestern North America. What is unfolding with our current resource depletion and coincidental economic unfolding has a endpoint not completely understood by anyone. Especially yours truly 

The next posting will be a link to a new blog series. Best wishes to all readers. This journey has been interesting and eye opening. Not the least of all is my new friendship with some sincere people in Angatuba.

MONDAY, DECEMBER 08, 2008

A Resilient Suburbia 4: Accounting for the Value of Decentralization

This series has been considering the role of suburbia in a post-peak future. One necessary, though generally ignored, element of any analysis of suburbia is a consideration of the value of decentralization per se. The decentralized mode of suburbia presents problems (greater energy requirements for transportation), and advantages (greater potential for individual self-sufficiency), but what about the economics and politics of decentralization itself?
This post will argue that, when measured from the perspective of the median participant, decentralization offers a superior structure for both economic and political organization, a structure that may prove far more sustainable in a post-peak world than our current, centralized, hierarchal patterns of organization. Suburbia, not as a model for material consumption, but as a legal and social lattice of decentralized and more uniformly distributed production land ownership, has the potential to serve as the foundation for just such a pioneering adaptation—a Resilient Suburbia.

There are many efficiencies gained through centralization and specialization (of both place and activity, or, as Jaques Ellul termed it, “technic”). These two principles combine to lay the foundation for most of “classical” economic theory. These efficiencies, however, also produce externalities—side effects that are generally unrecognized and unaccounted for when weighing the value gained by centralization and specialization. I’ve termed these “anti-economies.”

When weighing civilizational choices, it is also important to considering the dueling perspective of the median vs. the mean. A policy that grows overall wealth in an economy (raising the mean wealth) does not necessarily increase the wealth of most people within that economy (which is best measured by the median wealth). Is an overall richer society comprised of one super wealthy Tiger Woods and 100 destitute peasants preferable to an overall poorer society comprised primarily of a “middle class” at some level of wealth above destitute peasantry? How do we weight the value—from the perspective of economics, politics, sociology, sustainability, etc.—of equality of distribution versus overall wealth distributed? This is a question that is critical to any consideration of the value of decentralization, and represents a lens through which we must view the relative value of suburbia and its alternatives, their present failures, and future potential.
While, to some extent, the economics and politics of centralization cannot be separated, there are clear economic benefits to centralization and specialization. Great cities from New York and London in the present to the Hanseatic free cities or Phoenician trading bases of the past demonstrate this in spades.

If the economic advantages of urbanization are so clear-cut, what are its economic disadvantages? First, as an expression of hierarchy, a boundary analysis of cities must include their constituent hinterland—the region that produces the raw materials for urban production and consumes the services and products produced in the urban core. In our increasingly globalized world, this hinterland is also global—for example, the Vietnamese factory worker churning out products designed by the downtown LA design firm and financed by New York banks, or the peasant farmer’s income impacted by the cheap, subsidized grains produced on industrial farms and exported through the ports of major US cities. (Which comes first: the masses of urban poor dependent on government and aid organizations or the flight of farmers from small plots where they cannot compete with subsidized western agricultural exports?) In addition, peer-polity competition for control and coordination of this hinterland makes the hierarchal model of urbanization fundamentally growth-driven, and therefore unsustainable. Cities are peer-polities, competing with each other to coordinate and control the economic activity of the largest possible share of a limited hinterland. If one city were to focus on a sustainable, no-growth approach to this game, it would be out-competed by others more concerned with near-term growth and intensification. This is natural selection among polities. Cities, by virtue of their necessary participation in the global peer-polity “eco-system,” are forced to adopt unsustainable practices—or they are out-competed in the game for near-term survival by those who do. Where a superficial sustainability-consciousness exists, its effects are generally limited to token measures within the city’s political jurisdiction, rather than the relevant and vastly larger economic reach to its effective hinterland.

It is also important to consider the “success” of urbanization through the mean/median lens. Urbanization, and the industry, trade, and centralization of economic activity that it supports, certainly increases the mean wealth within its bounds, but what does it do to the median wealth? Further, if the requisite hinterland is included within the bounds of our analysis, does urbanization even increase the mean wealth within that boundary, or does it simply affect an increasing concentration of wealth? These are the structural disadvantages of the urban form. Do they outweigh its advantages? We simply don’t have the data to answer that question definitively. What we do know is that, especially within American and European cities, the environmental damages and marginalization of the “hinterland” population largely falls outside our borders, onto the fragile ecosystems and massive poverty of the second and third worlds. This civilizational accounting failure represents a massive subsidy to urbanization—perhaps the greatest subsidy in history, and one that is incredibly damaging and short-sighted.

No matter how energy-efficient cities may be (especially when compared to presently extant alternatives like suburbia), they are most fundamentally the manifestation of hierarchal structures engaged in peer-polity competition—a mode of human organization that, I believe, is at its core the root of humanity’s unsustainability (because it drives our demand for growth) and it is, itself, undesirable (because it emphasizes the mean at the expense of the median, marginalizing the vast majority of participants).

Not only are there distinct, structural disadvantages to the urban model, but there are also nascent advantages of decentralized, non-hierarchal organization. The potential for distributed manufacturing is one example. The potential, and advantages of decentralized innovation is another. 2000 small farmers each trying to develop a better system will develop and evaluate more theories than a single, equivalently-sized industrial farm, and the dispersed effort will also develop more locally-appropriate solutions. The advantage of decentralized innovation is particularly apparent in military innovation—the decentralized innovation laboratory of insurgents in Iraq, for example, has equaled or bettered the worlds single largest, centralized R&D facility (the US military-industrial complex), despite dramatic differences in funding, personnel, education, and other resources. Localized self-sufficiency and increased liberation from the peer-polity competition additionally frees innovators to focus on producing quality of life for the median, rather than intensifying the empire of the mean. The mindset of the 20th century was that physical aggregation was necessary for the hierarchal coordination of complex economic activities. The mindset of the 21st century may be that physical distribution excels, and is even preferable, when pursuing non-hierarchal, open source, and emergent coordination of complex economic activity.

There seems to be a nearly endless stream of skeptics who claim that physical proximity (e.g. the city) is necessary for the kind of complex economic activity that underlies our quality of life. Usually, in my opinion, these theories rely on an outdated or misinformed understanding of economic coordination. These doubters seem broadly unfamiliar with advances in open-source, distributed manufacturing; of platform-driven systems; of the potential for tying vernacular resource bases into global networks of open-source innovation. They usually focus on the services and amenities that cities can provide to the privileged few, while ignoring at great moral hazard the concomitant impact of these structures on the vast majority of its citizens—those that live beyond political borders but well within the economic hinterlands. Others point to the opportunities for interaction in urban areas—while it is certainly possible to see and interact face-to-face with more people in an urban setting on a constant basis, the attractiveness (or horror) of this situation seems far more closely tied to individual personalities and psychological adaptation than to any fundamental economic advantage of cities. Both evolutionary psychology and modern commerce suggest that cities may actually be counter-productive in these functions.

Dunbar’s number, for example, shows that human interaction functions best with group sizes of roughly 150--the norm in our ontogeny, and something that does not depend on the human density of cities. Additionally, cities may be liabilities when considering the theory of weak networks--the notion that the most powerful way to leverage humans’ limited capacity to form connections is to form several very strong, very close connections, and then several extremely distant and weaker connections. Cities present an environment more susceptible to tight-group isolation (though they don’t force such an arrangement), whereas the reliance by more distributed settlement on fairs (historically) and the internet (in modernity) may actually tend toward more powerful structure to coordinate economic activity.

This is not meant as a dispositive proof of the superior economic potential of distributed systems, but rather as food for thought—we tend to assume without questioning that cities are necessary and desirable for economic functioning, all the while ignoring significant evidence that this may be the result of little more than inertia. When readers wish to discuss a complex niche topic with other interested parties—a classic analogue for economic coordination—they are generally better served by a highly distributed virtual community (such as The Oil Drum) than by the kind of permanently physically collocated group one would find in a city. My guess is that even a well-connected individual in a “flagship city” like New York would be hard pressed to find the quality of discussion on a topic such as Peak Oil equal to what exists daily on this site. This same advantage spreads from agriculture to Medicine, to military theory--just one anecdote: go to the physical epicenters of military theory, such as the Army War College or one of the service academies, and you will fail miserably to find face-to-face discussions of the caliber you can find daily at John Robb’s blog between people from all over the world.

Additionally, highly centralized and specialized economic structures tend to require a great degree of “middle men” to effectively coordinate complex economic activity on a large scale. As a result, a huge majority of “workers” are not actually performing “end production,” but rather are performing some kind of coordination, command, or control activity. This is generally referred to as “Span of Control”—on the simplest level, one person can only effectively command so many subordinates. Historically, militaries have settled on a span of control of 5 (only 3 of which are operational). This leads to massive “middle management” in large-scale organizations. A similar effect exists in economics—while a massive dairy farm may reap significant economies of scale, it also tends to involve large behind-the-scenes forces performing management, compliance, legal, finance, marketing, transportation, human resources, and other non-milk-producing functions. Open source networks of innovation have the potential to fundamentally replace this mode of economic coordination in a manner that eliminates the need for this middle-management. Every producer a part-time innovator/theorist, and every innovator/theorist a producer. This might sound like a hippy fantasy-world to some, but it is happening right now from commodity coordination by individual peasant farmers in Africa (via cheap, disposable cell phones) to a revolution in insurgent tactics in Asia. Ask yourself, do you actually make anything? Do you even know anyone who actually makes anything? Or do you and most of your associates engage in one of these “coordinating” functions? If this is the “efficiency” of our current, city-centric economic structure, it looks more like a target of historic opportunity to me.

Finally, the same structural tendencies of our economic systems have dramatic effects on our political systems and the course of our civilization. Centralization and specialization are the opposites of self-sufficiency and independence. When we centralize production of something we require, as individuals or communities we become dependent on the system that provides continuing access. We’ve been so indoctrinated to the benefits (and hidden from the externalities) of these interlacing networks of dependency that we rarely realize the degree to which we have ceded our own potential for sovereignty. The implications are striking

sustainable agriculture

This from Dr Bruno Glasers paper. I've been enjoying reading this evening and the pdf file can be downloaded at this link. 

'Terra Preta formation cannot be simply achieved by charcoal addition to soil. It is likely, 

however, that combined additions of charcoal and organic manure such as chicken manure could produce 

sustainably fertile soils providing both stable (charcoal) and labile SOM, and nutrient pools, respectively. 

However, much more research is needed to make slash and char sustainable like Terra Preta.'

Ahem

My own results are confirming this statement in the second year of tests. It is the combinations that are producing the results, especially compost. Charcoal alone is same as control. For hands on use o f charcoal in our soils anyway. it is not rocket science. Use lots of charcoal and combine with compost. Our soil conditions are a highly leached, calcium rich, sandy loam where we struggle to maintain 4 % OM in a temperate climate.....

As I will be continuing this study as many growing seasons as possible complete neglect of my control and charcoal only plots is not making sense to me. Also I do not need to know if this effect of charcoal plus compost will fade away as the organic matter turns over in the natural process of decomposition.  

My test plots will be harvested in a few weeks from now and I will seed immediately with a early season cover crop, mustard, to make a organic matter contribution prior to summer planting. The nitrogen demand caused by this addition to the soil will be compensated by a light applications of urea during early growing season. We are a different kind of farm, not organic and also not commercial agriculture. We grow native plants and harvest tops and roots as bare root. Perfecting a growing regime that maintains or increases  soil OM and having consistent crop performance is the goal of this study. So far I am very happy to see the positive effect of compost inclusion on current crop that was made 2 years earlier. The additive effect of charcoal with compost is a further bonus that will be especially exciting if I can have this effect show next year and subsequent crops.

Rich H

Love into Biodiversity

Towards - Sustainable Communities, Sustainable Agroforestry in Sao Paulo State, Brazil.

In October and November of 2008, Dr Richard T. Haard of Bellingham Washington visited the community of Angatuba in Sao Paulo State, Brazil. This trip was planned for many months and after arrival began with interviews of community government leaders, community elders and selected business operations that exhibit activities truly sustainable. Studies of the Angatuba sustainable model as applied to the production of energy, food, materials for housing construction and other consumables needed by society while maintaining ambient status quo. 

The products that were developed in this phase of the work by Richard were digital images and video documentaries that were published in form of cd's, flickr and youtube postings. These were made available to the local people of Angatuba and to others in the global community who were following this work closely as supplement to their own sustainable community interests. 

Another aspect of the work accomplished was a survey of native plant populations, an  inventory of existing restoration nursery facilities, and analysis of soil and environmental conditions. Very serious soil management issues were identified in certain soil types where cropping and pasture management on steep hills have resulted in loss of any economic value of the land. In addition, these sites are continuing to degrade with unwise use and erosion of soils to parent material and bedrock. 

In discussion, it was agreed that any solution should provide income to landholder/farmer while soil degradation processes are stabilized. This all pointed to 'Alley Cropping' for the degraded soils in compliance with forest law planting 20% of the area with native trees. with detail study and gps location of soil conditions these places can be zoned for different classifications of production from firewood to sustainable of milk with dairy goats and complementary production of ethanol.

The use of native legume and pioneer ecological succession native tree species will bring deep penetration of roots and transmission of nutrients to the surface in leaf litter to and reestablish organic matter. Most important the roots of the legume trees fix atmospheric nitrogen into fertilizer. Contouring of the land and wise management stops soil erosion, builds moisture reserves and the environment is improved for other commercial crops in the farmed portions of the 'alleys'

Pertinent to this posting is this Youtube video we produced about community sugar and ethanol production and this older small producer documentary

Quote from Orlov's Blog

Here is a clip from Club Orlov

The author 'Chris' was writing that the lack of assets may be the greatest asset of all. Starting out that Australia and USA now saddled by leveraged debt are nations in poor health and condition. Whereas  this Philippines case study closely resembles my own findings in Brazil.

Very few people in these countries under the age of about 80 INSERT The USA and Australia INSERT  remember anything about what it means to have to survive somehow in the environment, from that environment. Look to the evidence online; how many sites are telling people to stock up on guns and ammo or to stockpile massive amounts of food? The guns will attract violence, the ammo will make those using it targets for those who have less ammo; the food will perish, attract rodents and thieves. In comparison, how many are teaching how to build suburban gardens, recycle small power and methane generators, and other practical adaptations?

The Philippines, like a number of other countries, is living in a paradox of different proportions. Outside of the biggest cities here, food is growing everywhere, in the villages themselves, as well as the agricultural lands around them. Most people here can tell you how to grow a list of useful plants and to raise chickens.
They are also very much used to sharing. There is virtually no government safety net here. To become eligible for social welfare payments, one must have held the same job for ten years; this almost never happens. Yet even in the moderate-sized cities, nobody starves. Interdependence is local and regional rather than national and international. Of course, there is a degree of modernization contributing to the welfare of people. Some people work in the cities or overseas and send money home to support the extended family. But even without this money life would go on.

Most people here are very fit compared to developed nation's. I have seen hardly any overweight people, let alone obese. Washing is done by hand in water pumped by hand from the ground. "Sounds horrible," I hear the average reader murmur: but it works and it means the people are physically fit. The main diet is locally grown rice with similarly grown meats and vegetables. Fruit can be expensive because a lot of it is exported, yet whatever is in season is abundant. The fishing trade here is mostly very small boats with small crews using small nets and lines; there are very few industrial scale fishing boats. I live near a fishing village where 95% of the income is derived from fishing in these small boats; the population of over 2,000 people is the healthiest, happiest bunch I have ever met.

Transport here is a world away from that in developed nations, yet there is no problem getting anywhere. Locally, there are tricycles and jeepneys going past all the time in all directions; these and the buses are very affordable for most people. Only about 2% of households have a car, and maybe half have a private 125cc motorcycle or tricycle. These vehicles get about 100 miles to a gallon of fuel.

The paradox is this: the Philippines greatest asset in the future may be its lack of assets now. Less debt, less dependence on expensive gadgets, less laziness and complacency. More communalism, more integration.