Kerrplunk

This is the long version of my response to today’s prompt on Advise the Advisor, which is about innovation:

Innovation doesn’t just happen in the world of the Internet. The biggest need for American innovation exists in some of the very oldest industries.

Food security is my biggest present concern. With industrial agriculture threatened by climate change, fossil fuel decline, and its own unsustainable practices, Americans are seeking sustainable, low-cost solutions they can be personally involved in. Innovative solutions include yard-sharing programs that connect apartment-dwellers with time to garden with homeowners who have the space to plant vegetables, urban farmers who use organic intensive cultivation techniques to grow thousands of pounds of food in a small lot, and peri-urban farms who offer their sustainably-grown produce direct to nearby city consumers through CSA subscriptions.

But the problem is still immense. America has too few farmers, and the farmers we have are on average past retirement age. Current regulations reinforce the unsustainable practices that are leading us to the edge of destruction. And government is making the problem worse, with regulations that favor big agribusiness and make it harder for local producers to reach consumers. We spend too much taxpayer money subsidizing the unsustainable practices of the past—funding cheap, inedible corn that makes livestock sick, gives our children diabetes, and rips nutrients out of the soil so they must be replaced with tons of fossil fuel-based fertilizer.

In their book A Nation of Farmers, Sharon Astyk and Aaron Newton state we need fifty to a hundred million new small farmers by the end of this decade to pick up where our retiring generation of farmers is leaving off and ensure our food future. These new farmers will need to be using new practices rooted in low-input, diverse farm ecosystems that minimize the use of fossil fuels. They will need to raise not just one crop, but many, carefully chosen so that the waste products of one crop support the others. They will need to be farming in urban and suburban landscapes as much as rural ones. They’ll need support from the government, investing money into strengthening our food system and providing sustainable and rewarding livelihoods for more Americans. And they’ll need a change in our regulations to make it easier and more affordable for small producers to produce and distribute safe food to more Americans. For example, rather than tough restrictions on milk sales that assume everyone selling milk is operating an industrial-scale confinement dairy factory, we need flexible rules that address the actual risks of contamination at different scales of production. By making these changes in the way we support new, innovative models of farming, we’ll enable creative, hardworking Americans to build rewarding livelihoods solving America’s food security challenges.

GMO crops are not a good solution to our food crisis. GMO crops are generally engineered not to produce viable seed. In order to replant crops, farmers have to buy their seed again and again every year from the same biotech company. If there is a problem with that company—and their reliance on fossil fuel energy and unproven technology, as well as government subsidies, make it a certainty that there will be a problem at some point in the future—then all the farmers who rely on that company for seed will have nothing to plant, nothing to grow, and nothing to feed America. Just like in any investment, we need a diversified portfolio. So legislation that makes it impossible to protect organic agriculture from GMO contamination threatens the future of America’s food supply—regardless of whether eating GMO crops poses a threat to the health of Americans. We can’t afford to become reliant on this technology, not when the fundamental resource needed for its production—fossil fuels—is threatened. For this reason I believe the recent deregulation of GMO alfalfa is a terrible mistake—one that hinders the ability of American farmers to explore other innovative, diversified solutions to our agricultural sustainability problems.

I ask the White House to join me in supporting small farmers experimenting with innovative new models of food security. Support Americans engaged in such exciting new projects as the Dervaes family farm, a 1/10th acre plot in Pasadena that produces more than THREE TONS of food per year, with no chemical fertilizers, pesticides, or herbicides. Support trials of permaculture methods, farming systems that use the natural interactions of plant and animal species to return fertility to the soil without the addition of chemical fertilizers, that control pests with their natural predators rather than with chemical poisons, and that produce an abundance of food on less land by growing different crops together in ways that sustainably increase productivity. Support efforts like those of The Land Institute to breed perennial wheat, so that we can minimize tillage and protect the fertility of American soil.

What do you have to say to the White House today?

I plan to do this every week, for every new prompt. Let’s see how long I can keep it up—and how long it takes me to get through. Will you join me?

With all the snowstorms blanketing much of the US right now, I feel a bit guilty that I’m still visiting family in Florida, where I grew up and where it is a cool 72ºF/22ºC outside.  On top of that I’m hearing that in the Southwest, natural gas shortages are leaving many homes without heat. (One Twitterer complains that President Obama caused the shortage by blocking drilling for natural gas and oil; I think this person misses the point that the shortage is caused by the unaccustomed cold weather shutting down refining and distribution facilities.)

We can’t rely on fossil fuels for long—natural gas peak production may be a few years further off than the crude oil peak, which by all reasonable accounts is either here or imminent. With all the attention the generation of electricity gets in the media—and there’s no denying solar photovoltaic, solar thermal, and wind turbine electricity sells pageviews—one of the most crucial problems we will have to face in our transition off fossil fuels is heating our homes.

It is becoming more and more apparent to everyone with the sense and knowledge to see it that global warming climate change weirding doesn’t mean six fewer months of winter. It means more severe weather all around—worse storms, worse droughts, worse snows, and worse summers. So planning for heating our homes is still going to be a major challenge. We need solutions that will keep us as warm as we need to be, without making the pollution and climate change problems worse. And surprisingly I think a big part of that is going to be firewood.

But we’ll need to manage our firewood in ways that don’t just sustain the status quo but actually help regenerate the land we’re part of. And a big part of this, I believe, is going to be establishing coppice systems.

Coppice is the practice of cutting trees so that they resprout from the stumps. Famously, Europeans and Native Americans have practiced coppice silviculture for firewood, basketry, and building materials. Willow is an especially favored species for basketry and certain types of building—the wattle and daub houses of ancient Britain come to mind. But willow makes lousy firewood. So what species coppice well and make good firewood?

Alder, ash, and black locust are all good coppice trees, resprouting easily from stumps and growing quickly. Ash is very good firewood. Reports differ on alder and black locust, and I suspect the efficiency of one’s stove will have a lot to do with how completely these woods combust (on which more later). One species I’d like to highlight, especially for people in the southwestern US right now, is Parkinsonia aculeata, also known as horsebean, jerusalem thorn, and blue palo verde, among other common names.

What’s good about this tree? Well, for one thing, it’s drought tolerant. The effects of global climate change on local rainfall patterns is not yet known, but it’s possible that areas that already get very little rainfall will get even less, and some areas with moderate rainfall will become drier while others will become much wetter. For the desert southwest and arid parts of California, Parkinsonia aculeata could be very useful. It is partly cold hardy, tolerating temperatures down to 18ºF/-7ºC. It is also leguminous, with the potential to restore nitrogen to the soil, although I believe this has not been studied in this particular plant. And when cut it regrows from the stump. It is also good bee forage, attracting pollinators with its bright yellow flowers. Its main drawback is that it can be invasive—because it propagates readily from seed or from cuttings, it’s hard to control. Arid environments help to control its reproduction from seed; it shouldn’t be planted in areas where there is more water than it needs. And here’s where another benefit of this plant comes in handy—it makes excellent goat browse. Livestock eat its leaves and seed-containing pods, and the fresh pods have a sweet edible pulp.

How might you manage this plant, given its tendency to become invasive in areas where it gets more water than it needs?

Well, first, I’d avoid planting Parkinsonia aculeata in moist meadows, streambanks, or near ponds or irrigation. Dry upland slopes are a better place. Second, cut it back on a regular basis for wood, and don’t plant more than you can use. Don’t leave fresh cuttings lying around on top of fertile soil. Finally, graze goats through the planting on a rotating basis so they can browse back new growth and seedlings and eat some of the edible seed pods. Pigs might also enjoy the pods and would probably disturb the ground under established trees to discourage new seedlings, but be careful they don’t rip up the roots of the established trees you’re coppicing.

It’s also important to get back to wood stoves that can efficiently and cleanly burn small-diameter firewood. If we aggravate our air pollution woes with particulates from incomplete burning, we’ll make our situation much worse. If we exacerbate the problem of carbon release by burning up existing trees and releasing their carbon without planting enough new trees to store the carbon we’re releasing and then some, we’ll make our situation much worse.

We’re running out of the carbon trust fund we’ve inherited in the form of fossil fuels, and we need a wise plan to help us live within our ecological means.

Just a short note to say I’m very pleased with the students in my introduction to permaculture course at New College of Florida this January. As so often happens in permaculture learning encounters, I learned as much from them as they did from me. They presented their final project today and I could tell it was exciting, inspiring, and new for their faculty. The project is on the way to implementation over the next year—I am very excited for them and hope they have a lot of fun with it.

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.

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.