Kerrplunk

Every so often I find it productive to leave a blog completely fallow for several months–or a couple of years–and then come back to it, possibly because I’m afraid regular posting might gain me an audience that I would feel an obligation to. It has probably been long enough that most people have wandered off by now.

I am presently living in a cooperative household in the SF Bay Area, where I’ve been building an earth oven, keeping a tiny flocklet of urban chickens, and growing vegetables. Our next door neighbor is a character with stories as long as your arm about his rough past and world travels, an unbelievable 30% of which may be true. I am engaging with a permaculture course, observing and interacting and hopefully strengthening my teaching repertoire slightly, and I am an interpretive naturalist at an ecological learning center. My living situation is virtually perfect except that it’s a little more expensive than I’d like, and my work situation is virtually perfect except that it doesn’t make me quite enough to live on. This is normal for these times, a situation which quite a lot of people are justifiably angry about. That just anger can be harnessed toward some beautiful productivity, but insofar as it is directed towards reforming the present broken system, it will not change overnight that which people are angry about.

I aspire to be part of the 100%, I told my friend—the 100% with enough healthy food to eat, enough clean water for drinking and bathing, safe enough places to live, and enough access to decent health care. I see that our system is designed not to deliver that. My earlier dream was to be part of building alternative systems that would allow people to gradually withdraw their support from the broken system so that it could collapse relatively painlessly. Now I believe that until the old system collapses, the majority of people will not cut themselves loose from it. I’m throwing in with those who call themselves the 99% in hopes that doing so will help to model potential new systems and allow the old to crumble with as little suffering as possible. But these are going to be uneasy times for most of us.

In the midst of this, permaculture offers what Sharon Astyk (after Pat Meadows) has called the theory of anyway: Whether or not oil is peaking, economy is collapsing, climate is warming, wouldn’t you rather be growing food and having fun with your neighbors, spending less money and more time, wasting less and having more? Would you rather dwell on scare-city or a-bun-dance? If we would rather be living this way anyway, what’s stopping us?

Via Ran Prieur, I’ve been directed to this post by Professor Nassim Taleb introducing the concept of “antifragility”—the property of systems to flourish in circumstances of disorder. In summary, it suggests that the opposite of fragility, the tendency to collapse due to change or disorder, is not robustness, or the resistance to collapsing due to change or disorder. It is antifragility—the tendency to benefit from change and disorder, to thrive and improve in health when circumstances vary wildly.

Taleb’s examples are not necessarily the most compelling to me—he suggests that in Greek mythology, an example of fragility is the Sword of Damocles, robustness is the Phoenix, and antifragility is the Hydra. Directed research, he says, is fragile, but doesn’t say why; opportunistic research is robust, but stochastic tinkering is antifragile. Some examples seem to be based on nothing more than the author’s simple prejudice (“Ways of thinking: Fragile—Modernity, Robust—Medieval Europe, Antifragile—Ancient Mediterranean.” What does this even mean?) Most familiar to my thinking process is his representation of modern industrial society as fragile, ancient settlements (I’m imagining the cities of Harappa as an example, which lasted virtually unchanged for 500 years before disappearing with no sign of catastrophic collapse) as robust, and the nomadic hunter-gatherer lifestyle as antifragile. Let’s talk about this example a little bit.

It is common to think of our industrial lifestyle as permanent, compared to past civilizations (which by definition don’t exist anymore) and nomadic hunting and gathering peoples (most of whom have been either wiped out or forced into some stable mode of participation with global industrialism). But this is a fallacy. We have been a global industrial society for perhaps 200 years. Rome, as a Republic and an Empire, which is everyone’s favorite example of how civilizations collapse, lasted 900 years, with a sharp transition in the middle from a constitutional republic to an expansive principate. Hunting and gathering were humanity’s main means of subsistence from the appearance of humanity (let’s say 1.8 million years ago) until at least 10,000 years ago, when agriculture began gradually to take over in most parts of the world. But the lifestyle itself persists even into the industrial era. Even if we manage to sustain industrialism for another 200 years in the face of the end of accessible fossil fuels, global climate change, and the failure of our economic systems to distribute necessary goods and services in a sustainable and resilient way, we can’t consider the experiment a success in terms of longevity as compared even to the Roman civilization, let alone to the hunter-gatherer model. Global industrialism depends on high energy expenditures and infinite growth, two conditions that simply cannot be maintained for long. The jury is simply still out on whether we will be able to make this system robust enough to withstand the conditions of the immediate future.

But in another sense we could describe the modern system as one that has emerged specifically to take advantage of conditions of abrupt change. The cascade of scientific development and industrial invention that resulted from the discovery and exploitation of concentrated fossil fuels could be seen as itself an example of antifragility—a creative, immediately useful adaptation to changing conditions. The speed of social change made possible by the exploitation of fossil energy has enabled us to capitalize on environmental changes in ways we never had available to us before. And yet it makes us fragile to an environmental change that we foresee, but at the moment have no idea how to respond to—the unavailability of those selfsame fuels. So it’s possible that fragility and antifragility are not opposites at all, but characteristics a system can possess in varying measures, and only with respect to certain conditions. A system might be antifragile with respect to climate change but fragile with respect to habitat loss. A system that simply changes dramatically and somewhat randomly in response to external change, with no particular care for whether that change is adaptive or destructive, would seem to have a high potential for both fragility and antifragility.

Perhaps the clearest example of antifragility is one that I do not see in Taleb’s table—evolution.

When living systems are disturbed by outside change, individuals expressing variations that offer greater survival and reproductive potential to the changed conditions survive and reproduce, and those that do not may die out or fail to pass on their genetic contributions. On the whole evolution appears to respond more rapidly in conditions characterized by environmental change and disorder. When environmental conditions are stable over long periods of time, selective pressure likewise changes little. Less pressure-driven random mutations that survive longer due to relatively constant conditions could have a detrimental effect on the species as a whole. The resilience of living systems depends on changing conditions.

But environmental change, to produce beneficial effects on living systems, has to occur within the constraints of what the system is able to tolerate without collapse. If changes come too quickly or are too extreme or sweeping, populations tend not to last long enough to evolve adaptation.

Dr. Taleb introduces an interesting concept—antifragility, fluxophilia, whatever you want to call it. But I think his characterization of it as the opposite of fragility perhaps oversimplifies the very complex reactions of creatively adapting systems to change. If we understand better the conditions that promote creative adaptation to change, we can use that to promote the development of more antifragile or fluxophilic human systems. I believe in a changing environment, this would promote greater resilience. What characteristics promote fluxophilia? How do emergent systems develop and strengthen this property?

I would suggest that they are process driven rather than rules driven. An example of what I’m calling “rules driven” is the common model of disaster preparedness—decide what potential changes you are likely to face, come up with a policy to respond to it, test the policy in a controlled simulation scenario, and then enforce adherence to the policy. An example of a process driven alternative might be the Superstruct game/modeling process advanced by the Institute for the Future. (FD: My friend works for this organization; she’s the one with purple hair.) In this game, the public at large was invited to imagine a future of upheaval and drastic—even disastrous—change. IFTF game developers offered general scenarios for the public to respond to, but the details were largely left to the imagination. Over 6800 people registered as participants, though undoubtedly some of them (FD: like myself) probably did little to contribute to the scenarios. However, among them, they created around 1000 stories about these future scenarios, which IFTF researchers have been mining for information about how people are likely to react to real change and using as a springboard to research the responses most likely to be productive.

A year ago this New Year’s Day, I had no idea where I would be in another two months.

After a year of dreaming about quitting my perfectly good office job and saying goodbye to my great boss just so I could immerse myself completely in the study of permaculture and sustainable food production, I’d finally realized that nothing ever happens tomorrow, it can only happen today. I talked with my boss and won her support, and made my today come sooner than I thought possible. I tightened my belt and saved enough money to give myself a safety net, and started sending out applications to all the internship programs I had wistfully researched before. I found a permaculture design certificate course that I could afford to take while wrapping up my work. On New Year’s, the deadline I’d set (and already extended twice) to transition out of my job breathed down my neck—but I still hadn’t settled on my ideal internship site. It wasn’t until February, when I visited Emerald Earth, that I would realize I’d found my place.

I spent seven months at Emerald Earth, a community focused on natural building training and permaculture, and learned so much about growing food, caring for animals, and tending the wild. I couldn’t wait for the next step. At the Hoes Down hosted by Full Belly Farm in October I was still wondering where my new knowledge would take me next.

It was there I met Nate. Our immediate connection was exciting, but I didn’t then imagine that just a few short months later we’d be building a solid business plan and embarking on a land search.

This past New Year’s Day, I realized I had brought myself full circle. Again, I don’t know where precisely I’ll be located in the next couple of months—but this time, I know I’ll be working for my farm. Our farm.

Uncertainty is always a bit stressful. But it’s also a time of wonderful mystery. The next few years could look like anything from here. I can make a few predictions with confidence—it will be a lot of hard work, the rewards will be 100% worth it, and it will be a bigger adventure than any I’ve undertaken yet.

Sustainability — Of systems, practices, processes, or cultures, that which can be continued indefinitely without destroying the foundation of its own existence. Antonym: suicide.

Resilience — adj. Of systems, practices, processes, or cultures, the ability to adapt creatively to a changing environment or context without destroying the foundation of its own existence. Antonym: suicide.

Sustainability and resilience are fundamentally linked.

Sustainability, the current watchword of contemporary environmental consciousness, is unfortunately now devalued and diluted in much the same way that “green,” “natural,” “eco-friendly,” and “organic” have been. When a word moves into popular awareness, and from there into the marketer’s toolbox, its meaning must change, because marketers depend on words meaning one thing in the mind of the public and another to the corporation using them. “Sustainable” is now used as a tag for “if you are of a particular age, race, income, and education level, chances are you will want to buy this thing rather than some competing thing.” No one aware of the effects of burning oil on our climate, or in possession of even a vague sense that the supply of oil is limited, can long delude themselves that buying a new hybrid car is “sustainable” by any honest definition. And like “unique” and “pregnant,” sustainable is one of those words that has no comparative; something is either sustainable or it isn’t. You can’t be a little bit pregnant and you can’t be more or less sustainable.

Unfortunately, one of the things we’re discovering is that often continuing an existing system, practice, process, or culture takes far less energy and material resources than creating a new system, practice, process, or culture, or substantially changing the old one to fit a new context. We are entering an age of decreasingly available energy, due to the decline of fossil fuels and reduction in availability of the renewable energy resources that so far still depend on fossil fuels to be produced. That is, there is less oil and coal available, that which is available is becoming more and more energy-intensive to extract, and demand is still rising. The renewable energy technologies all still depend on concentrated fossil fuels—we can’t make very many solar panels in solar powered plants, and building wind turbines depends on mining metals and producing plastics, processes that cannot be powered by wind turbines. As oil declines, we will see a decline in the availability of all forms of energy. We’ll have less and less ability to completely retool our systems—whether we’re talking about our transportation infrastructure or our economy or our food production or even our customs of communicating with each other—because the energy to do so just won’t be there.

The context we live in now is one of rapid change. For our systems to be sustainable, they must be able to adapt well to change—whether we’re able to anticipate our future needs or not. We won’t be able to overhaul our systems once those needs become apparent.

Likewise, a resilient system must also be a sustainable one. If a system cannot be continued indefinitely without destroying the basis of its own continuation, then the eventuality of that destruction is a change it is unlikely to be able to adapt to.

Because I have everything to live for.

Because I love nature—the feel of the warm sun and cool breeze, the miracle of green growing things, the softness of little sheep muzzles and ears, the taste of a strawberry seconds from the plant, the sacred intimacy of eating meat which had a name and a full life of joy and the pleasure of sweet pastures, the deep ocean, the dark forest, the sky at night full of stars the city never knows, the free-flying birds who have never tasted pesticides on their meal of bugs and worms, the owls at night in watchful care over the gardens full of tasty voles.

Because I love humans—art, late night talking, the hands skillful at building in straw and clay, the hands skillful in caressing, the lips trembling with tenderness, the prayers to broken stone and living earth and overpowering sky, imagination and play, the passion of the activists, the wild limbs outflung in the dance of Pan, the quiet words in the face of violence.

Because today I fed a yak from the palm of my hand.

Because the oil our whole society depends on is ending, and I don’t know what my life will be like, or the lives of my sister’s children, and I am afraid.

Because the planet is getting hotter, on average, and this means that in every place there will be stranger and stranger weather, and rising sea levels, and food shortages, and spreading disease; because all that I love is out of balance and edging further toward disaster, and I am afraid.

Because I like chocolate and bananas and the Internet and going out to eat and the ease of money, and I cling to these things even though I don’t love them as much as the cool moss and the flowing stream and the leaping salmon and watchful owl.

Because it is increasingly clear to me that I cannot have the fripperies of industrial civilization and global capitalism and also still have redwood trees, wolves, owls, bats, and the night sky untouched by electric light for miles in every direction.

Because I have everything I need right here.

Because a life some might call poverty is not so frightening as watching everything I depend on be ripped away from me, and so I will make a life in which everything I need is right here.

In the soil below me. In the sun above me. In the rain that falls.

Because the rewards and the risks all push me in the same direction. Because the love is a greater force than the inertia.

Because I love my family, my friends, the human people I know, and I want us all to be happy and free from suffering. Because I want all beings to be happy, to know peace, to be free from suffering.

And because it seems the only way to make that happen is to live a life where enough is enough. And because this is for me a far better way to live.

This is the time of year when the fruit trees grow legs.

They become spidery beings, some of them. Their branches, burdened with too much fruit to bear, risk breaking unless some human comes along and props them with a forked stake. They look like they’ve taken to walking very slowly with spindly legs across the land. Some, with only one branch bending downward under the weight of their developing fruit, become like human people standing proudly upright with the aid of a cane.

This culture makes us so determined to do more, make more, get more, provide more, produce more, that even the trees we breed don’t know when enough is enough. If human gardeners didn’t come through and thin the fruit, hardly any would ripen. If human gardeners didn’t prop up branches endangered by our love of excess, they would break and be lost, fruit and all. Each tree is expected to return on the orchardist’s investment every year, to produce harvests so great no family could appreciate the abundance. What’s amazing is that so many of them manage it.

Apple and pear trees planted here a hundred years ago still stand, and some still give fruit. In places their forks are cleft, as if the trees were rent apart by the burden of their own selflessly-bearing branches.