Urbs versus Ruralis
by Jason GodeskyOver a year ago, Toby Hemenway wrote an article for Permaculture Activist suggesting that in the case of a “crash,” the city may be a safer bet than the country, titled, “Urban vs. Rural Sustainability.” In response, In the Wake published a critique: “Deconstructing ‘Urban vs. Rural Sustainability’.” This debate was picked up by Ran Prieur, who commented, “I agree that Hemenway’s essay is flawed, but I keep plugging it because it’s still the best written argument that the city might be better than the country in the collapse. That’s an uncommon position that deserves more attention than it’s getting, with so many crashies taking for granted that urbanites will eat each other and cities will go extinct. I continue to believe that some urban areas will adapt, that the best cities will be preferable to many rural areas, and that cities will play a big role in the future of humanity, whether it makes sense ecologically or not.” Matt Savinar also added the In the Wake critique to his daily links, commenting, “I keep going back and forth on where I think it will be safer to be.” All in all, it seems a perfectly good time to offer my two cents on what I think of the city, the country, and how the two will fare in the context of collapse.
We have inherited a romantic vision of the farmer–a hard-working loner, tilling the soil to feed his family. He is mythologized in the American canon as a hero of rugged individualism and the liberty of self-sufficiency at the frontier. Thoreau and Emerson fixed that icon in American literature. Bush’s Secretary of the Interior, Gale Norton, even quoted a rancher in a lecture, claiming, “Farmers and ranchers are the original environmentalists. We more than anyone else want to preserve the tall grass for generations to follow.” That view sits well with that hero of American mythology, the Farmer. That is certainly the view that seems to pervade Hemenway’s piece as he begins to write of why he lived in the country for ten years. He writes:
We went a good way toward making that dream come true. The red clay of our former clearcut turned, in places, to chocolate loam, though I noticed that even as our trees matured I still seemed to be needing more wood chips from the electric company or manure from a stable two miles away. From the garden flowed a steady procession of fruit and vegetables, but I confess I tried to ignore how much well-water we were pumping once our rain catchment ran dry partway through Southern Oregon’s four-month dry season.
Though Hemenway is a permaculture advocate, and his garden was a permacultural one, his anecdotal account of his time in the country highlights some of the shortcomings of permaculture. From his own account, Hemenway never achieved sustainability. He writes of how long the trip to the grocery store was, of the lengths of wire he needed for necessary electricity, or the insufficient rainfall, all marking that even today, the land could not support permaculture on its own.
So, Hemenway tells us how he moved to Portland, where he was pleased to find himself surrounded once again by like-minded political activists, rather than the more conservative indviduals he had met in the country. He tells a story of sharing fruit with his neighbor, and leaves the impression that urban permacultural gardens would be sufficent to keep Portland alive.
This informal assessment of local resources has revised my mental landscape design. I don’t need to grow all my favorite trees, only the ones that my neighbors lack (I’m thinking Asian pears, persimmons, and some early and storage apples). My neighbor’s yards are my Zones Two and Three. Plus, Stacey and Troy on the next block have persuaded the owner of a vacant lot to let eight families create a community garden on the site. A local tree service will soon be dumping chips there for sheet mulch, and next year we’ll be awash in food.
Anthropologically, permaculture is a fancy name for a very old practice: horticulture. Like agriculture, horticulture is a type of cultivation. Unlike agriculture, however, horticulture is below the point of diminishing returns. Usually, this is some feature of the cultivation practice itself. For example, swidden horticulture–or “slash and burn”–involves cutting down the trees in a given area, and setting them on fire. In the rain forests, where all the nutrients are locked in the trees, this may be the only way to successfully cultivate. Slash-and-burn can be sustainable with the right population, and a slow enough cycle of new plots, but it is a very precarious balance. Once disrupted, slash-and-burn will wipe out the village that depends on it in short order. So, these villages keep their cultivation below the point of diminishing returns, because escalation is not feasible.
Many permacultural practices are taken directly from horticultural practices. Seedballs, for example, were used by the Iroquois. Permaculture enthusiasts often point out how much more productive permaculture is than agriculture and they are, to some extent, correct. Horticulture is far more efficient than agriculture–according to Marvin Harris’ calculations, it is the most efficient subsistence method available. That said, horticulture still has its capacity. One of those capacities, as Hemenway’s own account illustrates, is that not every location is suited for permaculture. Some don’t have enough rainfall; others may not have sufficient sunlight. Some methods require certain kinds of geographical formations–like mountains, hills, valleys, or rivers. All of these conspire to make horticulture an insufficient answer for 6.5 billion in the face of collapse.
That doesn’t mean that horticulture is an unsustainable approach on a smaller scale, of an individual like Hemenway, or a small community. As the In the Wake critique concluded of Hemenway’s obstacles:
These problems are all things can be solved by planning ahead if you are planning to move out into the country from the city. … And the same goes for planning your garden and land so that you can get enough water and manure without importing it. That’s a precondition for sustainability.
With an exuberance that seems typical of far too many permaculture enthusiasts, Hemenway simply multiples the efficiency of permaculture times the land available in Portland, and comes to the conclusion that the entire city could be fed. Such a naive analysis neglects all those areas that are unfit for permacultural use, for the various reasons mentoned above. Most cities could become much more sustainable than they are now by growing gardens, sharing food, and other measures–and as the pressure of collapse mounts, those will no doubt be among the first options people turn to–but there is an inescapable problem of density to consider.
Density of population is a function of density of nutrients and the ability to transport those nutrients. Everyone in a city must be fed a certain number of calories every day, and if those calories are not in the city, they must be transported there. Cities have very dense concentrations of population–far, far denser than could ever be provided within the city itself, because it comes down to photosynthesis. Only so much sunlight falls on a given area of land per unit of time, and thus, the amount of energy that land has from the sun per unit time is fixed. Plants convert some of that energy into sugars, which provide some of their energy to herbivores, which provide some of their energy to carnivores. At each trophic level, there is an enormous loss of energy. Humans occupy one of the highest trophic levels on earth. Even on strictly enforced vegetarian diets, it tooks a good deal of solar energy to feed a single person for a day. Multiply that times the nearly two million people who live in Portland and its suburbs, and you see energy requirements far beyond the solar budget of that typically overcast city.
Thus, Portland requires transportation. Like all cities, Portland is not self-sufficient. It requires the import of energy in the form of food from those areas that have it in surplus–that is, from the country. Without that import–that is, without transportation, international trade, and a national government–that is, in the case of collapse–Portland would quickly lose its ability to feed itself, even with permaculture gardens to soften the blow. The nature of the city is that of a parasite, utterly dependent for its survival on its surrounding hinterland. A permacultural city could soften this blow by providing some of its own food, and thus reducing the amount it must exploit from the hinterland, but robbing a man of only $500 instead of $1,000 does not make the act any less a robbery. Such is the nested, exploitative nature of hierarchy itself. The leader is a parasite who exploits the people to stay alive; the people crowd into cities around the leader that exploit the hinterland to stay alive; the empire made up of core cities exploits its colonies and periphery to stay alive. To maintain the city is to maintain hierarhcy and civilization itself.
We have been taught to run to the cities for protection. Instinctively, as social animals, we find protection in other people, and where will you find more “other people” than in the city? Here we come to another disturbing point in Hemenway’s narrative: his urban elitism, and his inability to separate out the fallacy of the “rugged individualist.” He writes:
Slowly a mild paranoia set in. I started to wonder whether, if the Big Crash came, I was really in the right place. We had the best garden for miles around, and everyone knew it. If law broke down, wasn’t there more than a chance that my next door neighbor, a gun-selling meth dealer and felon, might just shoot me for all that food? How about the right-wing fundamentalists past him, who shot Stellar’s jays for fun and clearcut their land when they suspected spotted owls lived there? Or the two feuding families beyond them—one had fired a pistol during an argument, and neither would give way when their cars met on the road.
Responding to this passage specifically, the In the Wake critique offers a sharp response:
My question is, are the police in the city any less likely to take that food from you by force, as “taxes” if there is a major shortage of food? And do you think that if you resisted them they would not harm you to get it? In New Orleans, police took food and water from starving refugees, and that emergency was really quite brief by comparison to a permanent collapse.
Who is a larger threat, one armed person, or a large, trained, organized and extremely well-armed group? And who are you more likely to win over to your side, a neighbour with whom you can share food, skills and tools? Or a large group of psychological conditioned people trained in allegiance to the state? And besides, armed neighbours are abundant in cities, too, and in a shortage almost anything can be used as a weapon.
Earlier, this was offered:
First of all, Hemenway describes difficulties he had with country living, including a lack of common ground with and conflicts between his neighbours, trouble getting enough water, manure and wood chips for his garden, and “watery beer”. These problems are all things can be solved by planning ahead if you are planning to move out into the country from the city. Don’t move to a place where you won’t get along with the neighbours, or where you feel threatened by them. Hemenway’s implication by generalization is that all rural people are uncultured and violent, which is simply not the case, but it is a common stereotype held by privileged suburbanites. I’m sure that in some rural places there are many people I wouldn’t get along with or would feel threatened by, and in some places there aren’t. (When I was biking across southern Saskatchewan I came across some of the nicest strangers I’ve ever met.) I’m also sure that the same goes for cities. It’s all a matter of choosing a place that works for you ahead of time. If you don’t do that, you can’t blame it on all rural people.
Obviously, besides a location where his permaculture project was not sustainable, Hemenway also erred in his inability to buck the “rugged individualist” part of the Farmer mythos. Humans depend on their communities for survival; Hemenway’s project failed as much for his failure to plan for building a community, as for his failure to plan for his material needs. That said, if cities are doomed to starvation without exploiting a hinterland to feed them, how likely is that hinterland to continue with an agricultural life? Short answer: not very.
Koetke’s “Final Empire” highlighted the importance of topsoil to life on earth, and then began recounting the devastating impact agriculture has had on that topsoil:
In 1988, the annual soil loss due to erosion was twenty-five billion tons and rising rapidly. Erosion means that soil moves off the land. An equally serious injury is that the soil’s fertility is exhausted in place. Soil exhaustion is happening in almost all places where civilization has spread. This is a literal killing of the planet by exhausting its fund of organic fertility that supports other biological life. Fact: since civilization invaded the Great Plains of North America one-half of the topsoil of that area has disappeared.
Plants, like any other organism, takes in nutrients, and excrete wastes. For plants, those are nutrients they take out of the soil, and waste they put into the soil. In nature, what one plant excretes as waste, another takes in as nutrients. They balance each other, and all of them thrive. But monoculture–planting whole fields of just one crop–sets fields of the same plant, all bleeding out the same nutrients, all dumping back in the same wastes. It is precsely the same effect as filling an empty room with people and sealing it completely off. Eventually, the entire room will be full of carbon dioxide, and there will be no more oxygen. Monoculture does to topsoil what locking yourself in a garage with your car engine running does to a human.
As that happened, we also invented ever more powerful petrochemical fertilizers to offset the death of the soil, giving the illusion that all was well. The Dust Bowl, though, arose because our innovation was outpaced by the devastation. We quickly got back on top of it, though, leading us to the current situation. In “The Oil We Eat,” Richard Manning dramatically illustrated how much our “breadbasket” now relies on oil when he wote:
Corn, rice, and wheat are especially adapted to catastrophe. It is their niche. In the natural scheme of things, a catastrophe would create a blank slate, bare soil, that was good for them. Then, under normal circumstances, succession would quickly close that niche. The annuals would colonize. Their roots would stabilize the soil, accumulate organic matter, provide cover. Eventually the catastrophic niche would close. Farming is the process of ripping that niche open again and again. It is an annual artificial catastrophe, and it requires the equivalent of three or four tons of TNT per acre for a modern American farm. Iowa’s fields require the energy of 4,000 Nagasaki bombs every year.
Iowa is almost all fields now. Little prairie remains, and if you can find what Iowans call a “postage stamp� remnant of some, it most likely will abut a cornfield. This allows an observation. Walk from the prairie to the field, and you probably will step down about six feet, as if the land had been stolen from beneath you. Settlers’ accounts of the prairie conquest mention a sound, a series of pops, like pistol shots, the sound of stout grass roots breaking before a moldboard plow. A robbery was in progress.
To refer to the “Fertile Crescent” today is a cruel joke, but this was not always the case. Once, this region was abundant. The arid desert we see today is the result of agriculture. In the first episode of Guns, Germs & Steel, a three-part documentary version of Jared Diamond’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book, archaeologist Mohammed Najjar at the site of an ancient agriculturalist village in Jordan, looked out over the desert landscape and said:
People were destroying the environment. The waters had been over-exploited, the trees had been cut, and this is what when, when, when you, when you face the, the end, I mean you are facing the wall. You will end with landscape like that, mean with, with few trees, with no grass, and with less water. So what we are looking at today is the outcome of over-exploiting the environment.
It is a frightening thought: we made the deserts of the Fertile Crescent. The first farmers stripped it of all life, and then spread out to the east and west to consume the next region, like the alien invaders of some clichéd science fiction movie. They eventually reached the Great Plains. Beneath feet of fertilizers made from oil and natural gas, the soil is eroded and exhausted. When farmers first came to the New World, it was rich farmland. They farmed it, and bled it dry. We cannot go back to the agrarian life we once lived–the topsoil that life depended on was bled to death by that very agrarian life that we once lived. While some small pockets of arable land may remain, the amount of the world that can be farmed without fossil fuels is tiny–and in an age of global warming, tiny will shift to miniscule.
James Lovelock, inventor of the Gaia hypothesis, argues in his new book, The Revenge of Gaia, that it is too late to stop global warming–we have passed the point of no return. He argues that a thin layer of aerosol from industrial pollution has caused global dimming, and has retarded global warming slightly. With the end of industrialism, that layer will quickly dissolve, causing rapid increases in temperature. Our cereal grain staples are tempermental crops, requiring very specific parameters of soil composition and climate. With the end of cheap oil, they will have neither.
Are we doomed, then? Hemenway and his critics consider only the two poles of the rural farmer and the city slicker–they neglect entirely the natural state of humanity, the hunter-gatherer. Topsoil dead to cereal grains are rich in other compounds that other plants flourish in. Humans evolved on African savannas, and are naturally disposed towards warmer temperatures than those most of us reside in now. Deserts where farmers starve are home to vibrant forager cultures. While a dry spell or a hot year can kill off farmers, foragers are transhumant omnivores among whom starvation is nearly unheard of–even in the Kalahari.
Which is safer, the city or the country? The country, obviously! The only way that you could make the wilderness dangerous is if you tried to farm it.
Steve and I were discussing permaculture this evening, and he cited the example of Havana. Seemed like a case of unexamined inputs to me, so I did some research. Steve said Havana was producing 80% of its own food through agriculture, but the only reference I could find remotely like that came from the Good Food Directory:
Granted, Cuba is small, so that in itself is fairly impressive–but there’s a significant difference between Havana producing 80% of its own food, and Cuba producing 80% of its own food.
Now, Havana does have some very impressive urban agriculture. But this interview with Luis Sanchez Almanza gives us something that sounds a little more realistic to me, regarding Havana’s suburb of Santa Fe:
Finally, Scott G. Chaplowe’s “Havana’s Popular Gardens: Sustainable Urban Agriculture” highlights some of the problems in Havana–precisely the problems I would expect of such a project:
Mind you, these are all laudable efforts, and things we should consider undertaking ourselves, but unless these sources are sorely mistaken, Havana does not set seem to set any precedent for a “sustainable city.”
Comment by Jason Godesky — 16 January 2006 @ 11:25 PM
This was from an article in Harper’s Magazine in June, called “The Cuba Diet”
“every formerly vacant lot in Havana seems to be a small farm. The city grew 300,000 tons of food last year, nearly its entire vegetable supply and more than a token amount of its rice and meat, said Egidio Páez Medina, who oversees the organopónicos”
So, it seems they can produce most of their specialty goods, but not the staples.
It’s a really interesting article. It does seem to imply though that these less destructive farming techniques would and will be discontinued the moment the opportunity to import farm chemicals once again presents itself.
Here’s the link:
http://www.harpers.org/TheCubaDiet.html
Comment by limukala — 17 January 2006 @ 12:16 AM
If Lovelock is right, and he probably is, then humanity is pretty much doomed, City or Country, hunter-gatherer or not. This site is great, but I feel it has overlooked the possibility that we may have screwed up the planet so badly that we will not survive in any form.
Now, if we kick off a Runaway Greenhouse effect before Industrial Civilization buys it… (Or have we done so already, without realizing it? Everyone used to scoff at the 5 to 8 degrees Centrigrade of warming Lovelock mentions, but now they don’t. What if it is even worse? If effects we haven’t taken into account are slowly getting started?)
Comment by Eric — 17 January 2006 @ 2:20 AM
I’m still hoping that there’s a chance for life in urban edge environments — ones close enough to the city so that you can scavenge from the leftovers and far enough away to plot out and regenerate some land. Especially here, near the Santa Monica mountains, there are still oaks and other forms of local food.
Sigh. Hate to think I’m one day going to have to move away from home.
Of course, collapse in L.A. is going to be fascinating. It’s a car-culture so when fuel prices go up, things are going to contract quick. It’s doubtful hordes of cannibals are getting anywhere in any reasonable space of time.
That might be enough for semi-isolated tribes to be the ones left standing. Or maybe that’s wishful thinking…
Best
Bill Maxwell
Comment by Bill Maxwell — 17 January 2006 @ 3:06 AM
I think what is important in the Hemmenway essay is the vision is provides. It’s not a long term vision but it is one that I think we are going to need. Their are very few people talking sensibly about how we are going to cooperate when peak oil starts to bite in. A lot of people are preparing to hole up somewhere with 100 years of tinned food and a supply of amo but not many are talking about relying on our community for survival - which is what most people are going to end up doing.
I’m not saying what Hemenway suggests is permanently sustainable or that his reasoning is very deep but he does (perhaps accidentally) tell a story about reliance on community that is rare. Perhaps our form of civilsation is so anti-community that it just doesn’t occur to us.
I agree that high density cities are not sustainable but people like David Holmgren have pointed out that suburbia lends itself to permaculture solutions and the reality is that most people in the western world are going to be living in suburbia and needing to be able to grow their own food - maybe even in a few years.
I’m interested in what you make of the claims of biointensive gardeners that they can feed a person all year round on 1000 square feet. I believe there is a book with a title to this effect but that some other writings suggest a larger (but still not large)area is required.
Comment by Aaron — 17 January 2006 @ 5:49 AM
Hey –
When I read Gaea’s Garden (Hemenway), I found the one, consistant, ‘problem’ I had with all of the permaculture info was the sense that to make it work, one must strictly control how the garden evolved. That may sound strange, because it is the antithesis of some of the outright statements in the book… but the undercurrent was there as clear as day, IMO.
Now, hearing about his ‘failed’ attempt and the well water he used, etc etc, I have to assume that he was trying to force unsuitable plants to survive, simply because they were the plants he WANTED to survive. For permaculture to be truly viable, I really believe that it must be approached on the assumption that we are enablers. We can provide a plot of land with the nutrients, organic matter and starter plants that will allow it to develop a rich ecosystem — and then we must LEAVE IT ALONE. Natural Selection knows much better than we what works and what doesn’t. (I should modify that — if a given plant or set of plants don’t take, I see no problem with adding others that may do better… but the objective HAS TO BE to make ourselves irrelevant in the long term)
Janene
Comment by Janene — 17 January 2006 @ 10:08 AM
Not overlooked; thesis #28 addressing that very question of human survival will go up today. Basically, as profoundly negative as our impact has been, it is simply hubristic to think we can wipe out life on earth. Life is resilient. The very devastation we create makes niches for new and different types of life.
As far as escalating global warming goes, there are always negative forces that push it back into balance. I agree entirely that when it’s all said and done, it’s going to settle at a much hotter balance–probably one where there’s really no part of the earth suitable for agriculture, I’ll even go so far as to agree that there may be a band about the equator that’s uninhabitable for humans.
Ever hear of the Snowball Earth? Scientists discounted it, because the albedo would be so high that the planet would never be able to warm up to its current temperature. They forgot to factor in the beginning of life–and with it, the beginning of the greenhouse effect with the atmoshperic changes that ultimately led to the Oxygen Holocaust. Once that was illustrated, it became a lot more feasible. Point being, there’s always something to push it back into balance–there’s always some new state of equilibrum.
Lovelock’s a great ecologist, but he’s a poor anthropologist. Civilization is incredibly fragile, but humans are as adaptable as cockroaches. We evolved on the African savanna; we’re well adapted to warmer climes. He’s right that our civilization will likely collapse, but he seems to conclude from that, that humanity will die along with it. That’s not how any previous collapse worked, and I don’t see any reason why this one should work that way, either. What I see as Lovelock’s error is as understandable as it is profound: civilization is not humanity.
I’ve been assuming that all of this will be the case. That will mean a rearrangement of the coasts and, basically, all of our climate zones shifting pole-ward. Temperate zones and tropical zones will still exist–they’ll just exist at different latitudes. Polar climates may disappear. It’ll be something to adapt to, that’s for sure, and it’s going to require populations to be willing and able to migrate with the changing climate. But humans are up to it. We’ve survived climate changes before, like the end of the ice age. We’ll survive this one, too.
But ultimately …. if all of humanity’s going to die, and it’s too late to do anything about it now, then there’s not much else to do but what we’re doing, is there? There comes a point where you need to rely on Pascal’s wager to determine your course. Even if we’re all doomed–and I find that highly unlikely–what better course could we pursue than the one we’re on?
Interesting. The idea of building a community and relying on that for survival is probably the most oft-repeated refrain I’ve heard, coming from all quarters, so I didn’t find Hemenway’s suggestion on that score to be at all unique. Instead, I found the unique part of his message to be a distinctly ill-conceived–and therefore doomed–way of pulling such a community together.
May well be–depending on where that 1,000 square feet is located. Under the right conditions, sure. But not all 1,000 square feet plots are created equal.
Janene, whenever somebody like Hemenway comes along and makes me think this whole permaculture thing isn’t such a hot idea, you’re always there to show me a way that it could be a really great thing. Maintains my continuing ambiguity on the subject, and I thank you for that.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 17 January 2006 @ 11:01 AM
Cool
Janene
Comment by Janene — 17 January 2006 @ 1:23 PM
“Interesting. The idea of building a community and relying on that for survival is probably the most oft-repeated refrain I’ve heard, coming from all quarters”
Maybe in the circles you move in, but mainstream life is pretty much anti-community, most people think they are going to have to go it alone and much of the peak oil community seems to be made up of mainstream people for whom this is their only activist issue. Maybe this is just my experience but I’ve found it quite hard to talk to them about survival in the suburbs
Comment by Aaron — 17 January 2006 @ 4:48 PM
While I doubt that any city could grow its required foodstuffs within the city proper, it seems no one has considered the idea of small city-states, wherein a hefty amount of farmland surrounds a high-density (2,500 people per square mile), low population (500,000 citizens) city.
The city could supply 25% of the required food. The rest would come from the farmland surrounding the city. Food would be traded for services, or for manufactured goods; city-states could trade with surrounding tribes and other, faraway cities.
Now, whether or not this is a good idea and whether it is sustainable I will not say (I would suggest that such a city would be significantly less unsustainable), but the thought is at least a feasible one.
- Chuck
Comment by Chuck — 17 January 2006 @ 6:22 PM
Hence my discussion of hinterland, and transportation, as that’s the obvious solution to the problem. Except, how do you get the hinterland to go along with being exploited in a collapse scenario?
Comment by Jason Godesky — 17 January 2006 @ 6:32 PM
For transportation, I thought about that. It may seem to be stupid at first look, but if a city is on the coast (as most would be, for trade purposes and because that’s where the rivers tend to be widest) then most farmland would be upslope of the city. Transportation of food and/or goods into the city would be mainly downhill, which is significantly easier than uphill, esp. when using a simple wheeled cart. Getting the cart back to the farm is a different matter, but it would be of course much lighter. The problem may be solved even better by building carts out of woods like bamboo and balsa.
As for getting people to accept being exploited, I have no hard and fast answer, but I guarantee that many people would go along with such a system, and not even consider themselves to be exploited. Government on a scale comprehensible to its citizens is not a perfect solution, but it’s better than what we’ve got. Believing that the Sovereign Nation of Seattle or the City-State of Portland is the best place in the whole wide world to live would also help a great deal. People who’ve never been anywhere else believe this every day, just ask the average American.
There is a draw to the horticulturalist’s life. If the farmer is celebrated, like in Russia and (I believe) fuedal Japan, people might even do it of their own volition.
Also, an oft overlooked point among primitivists is that there are actually people who prefer to be in a hierarchical system. This isn’t because they’re stupid or because they’re magically better adapted to it, but because they like it. That there will never be a time where you cannot find at least one person who wants to live in a city, who wants to be a part of the SNS or the CS of P.
- Chuck
Comment by Chuck — 17 January 2006 @ 10:04 PM
At first, no doubt. But every civilization must spend a great deal of its energy on legitimizing activities–providing some excuse for its existence, and providing the impression that it serves some purpose. The city would need to justify this position to the hinterland–not at first, but with the passage of a few years, that would become a major issue.
I reject that. I believe there are many people who’ve made their peace with it and accepted it, but I don’t think there’s anyone who likes it.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 17 January 2006 @ 11:03 PM
Comment by limukala — 18 January 2006 @ 2:58 AM
The primary action objective of the Post Carbon peak oil community is building relocalization networks. The intent is to begin a networked movement that cultivates the seeds of a parallel public infrastructure with the ultimate goal of bioregions comprised of locally interdependent ecocities, eco-towns, sustainable food production, and wild areas. The seeds already exist in our communities – in the memories of the elders, the wisdom and practices of indigenous people, non-governmental groups working on localization, entrepreneurs that want to improve the community, dedicated local government officials and individuals who understand the importance of preparing for an energy-constrained future.
Comment by ov — 18 January 2006 @ 6:33 AM
The ones who kill themselves in record numbers? I know a lot of those elites and, frankly, even they don’t like this setup.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 18 January 2006 @ 10:37 AM
Actually, I was referring to the military. I see it every day. Hell, I’m sitting in the office and I’m looking at someone who loves it as I type.
::Shrug:: All I can suggest is that you don’t know everything. By ouright rejecting a possiblity, you limit what you can know and understand about the world. I could understand if you said that you found that possibility extremely unlikely, or that you’d never seen it before, and didn’t expect to. But there are a lot of people who have rejected things in the past, and it hasn’t made their rejections untrue.
I’m not saying that I’m unequivocally right or that you’re unequivocally wrong (or vica versa), but just that we don’t know whether there are any humans alive today who would choose hierarchy over egalitarianism. We can’t know for sure until we actually see it. I think that it could happen, and you think it couldn’t. I make no moral judgment about whether such a choice would be right or wrong. You have your opinion, I have mine. Neither one of us knows for sure.
- Chuck
Comment by Chuck — 18 January 2006 @ 12:23 PM
I can’t even concieve of it. I’ve never met someone who, on some level, didn’t think something was terribly wrong with all this. Even military types. I can’t even imagine how such a person could exist. So, I reject it. I’d have to meet such a person before I’d be able to entertain the possibility that it exists.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 18 January 2006 @ 12:29 PM
Jason,
re: people loving hierarchy, I’ve met some. The bottom line for them is that no matter how bad it gets, the reward is waiting just over the horizon. A better world. Yup. It’s almost here. Really. Any minute now.
And they can live entire lives like that. It’s kind of spooky.
Best
Bill Maxwell
Comment by Bill Maxwell — 18 January 2006 @ 3:24 PM
Oh, I’ve met people like that, too. I’ve met people who, on the surface, seem like they love the system. But if you get to know them, you find out that they’ve simply made their peace with it, not that they like it. They may accept it as a necessary evil, but that’s a very different thing from liking it. They believe their reward is just around the corner, but that doesn’t mean they don’t recognize the cost. Even for those that feel they “made good,” they can recognize that something is wrong. They may feel it’s all worth it, and they may not believe you if you tell them it doesn’t have to be this way, but they still know that something is wrong.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 18 January 2006 @ 4:05 PM
::shrug:: Okay. I can’t argue with that sort of logic. I can just point out that simply because you can’t concieve of such a person and/or you’ve never met such a person doesn’t mean they can’t exist. I’m not claiming that they do, just that they may.
- Chuck
Comment by Chuck — 18 January 2006 @ 4:43 PM
To allow the possibility would require me to fundamentally rearrange my entire conception of humanity, the universe, and the philosophical nature of reality. To date, that understanding has shown great predictive power, like a good scientific hypothesis should. So, I find it more likely that there are no such people–that anyone, if you get to know them, will reveal their discomfort with the current situation.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 18 January 2006 @ 4:58 PM
“For permaculture to be truly viable, I really believe that it must be approached on the assumption that we are enablers. We can provide a plot of land with the nutrients, organic matter and starter plants that will allow it to develop a rich ecosystem — and then we must LEAVE IT ALONE.”
Janene, I completely agree with you. Are you implementing this approach yourself? It’s just the kind of thing I’ve been trying to work out. Sort of intensive hunter-gathering, if there can ever be such a thing.
I really like the Anthropik approach of just leaping into the wilderness, but you lot are lucky to be in a part of the world where this is possible. In Europe this would be like jumping into an empty swimming pool.
Europe is pretty crowded, and national parks in Britain consist of FARMS. Real wilderness can only be found in Scandinavia, or eastern Europe, neither of which appeal to me. In theory I suppose I could live there, but I am not as confident as Jason et al are in the immediacy of the crash, and I also think it could take a Bill Joy form, rather that a James Lovelock one. I therefore think it could take much longer, so I want to live somewhere where I won’t get too cold or depressed. Land is also expensive. The result of all this is that I am very keen on staying in the nicer parts of Europe and taking the approach of encouraging nature to be more edible in a kind of fusion of permaculture with the kind of philosophy we have on this site. Whether this is a viable approach or not is something I have yet to find out. But I hope so - it’s always nice when the world conforms to one’s ideology.
Comment by Clive — 18 January 2006 @ 5:31 PM
Hey Clive –
I’m just getting started
This fall I read Hemenway’s Gaea’s Garden and last summer, I had my very first ‘wild’ tomato plant. Next spring, I am planning a permaculture design around my crab apple tree and we’ll see how that goes.
Certainly, as my experiments progress, I will be making reports.
Janene
Comment by Janene — 18 January 2006 @ 6:12 PM
Janene,
good luck! I hope to be able to begin messing around with the practicalities this year as well. I’ve just got hold of Vol. I of “Edible Forest Gardens” by Dave Jacke, and his ideas (and data) seem to be pretty helpful. Also, I don’t know if you’ve been there yet, but the Plants For A Future website is a pretty good resource with a massive database.
Comment by Clive — 18 January 2006 @ 7:03 PM
There are people who love the current situation because the benefit greatly from it. There are also those who would agree to anything - and they don’t count.
Comment by Rick Larson — 18 January 2006 @ 11:18 PM
Or, you could just allow the possibility that there are things about humans that are outside your experience.
Frankly, I’m a bit puzzled at how shocking you find the idea that there may be some humans, somewhere, that prefer hierarchy to egalitarianism. It’s not such a big deal. It’s not attacking your ideas, and it’s not attacking you. Yet you seem to react so ferociously in defense.
- Chuck
Comment by Chuck — 19 January 2006 @ 12:01 AM
Chuck, think about it. If a human, any human, truely enjoyed civilization. Being enslaved, etc, the whole shabang. That would indicate that either people are or are well on the way to becoming fully adapted to being civilized. This changes a lot of things. It’s also not supported by the evidence. Remember, the United States, shining light of civilization, has incrediably high mental illness rates, suicide, etc. The very fact that our movement exists indicates that people do not love civilization. Although a majority suffers from a lack of imagination or motivation.
Comment by Benjamin Shender — 19 January 2006 @ 2:47 AM
Ben,
I’ll take this one point at a time.
No, it would just indicate that those who enjoyed it had a differing mindset from the mainstream, based on either genetics or the way they were raised, or both, or neither. There have been eccentrics since the beginning of ever.
God damn, deja vu. I swear, I had this exact conversation last night at dinner with a friend. Of course it changes things. That’s why you prepare for its possibility now. If it ends up that there were, in fact, no humans who wanted to live in city-states and are willing to be career horticulturalists, then so be it. If there are, then you’ve already planned for and mentally dealt with the contingency. As an Eagle Scout, I say, “Be Prepared.”
Yes, hierarchy sure does do that to people. But that’s not the evidence being argued. What’s being argued is the absence of evidence one way or another…
…and this is exactly what I mean. From a purely scientific standpoint, that your movement exists does NOT indicate that people do not love civilization, but rather that quite a few people do not love civilization. That quite a few people hate hierarchy. But nowhere can I see conclusive evidence against the existence of a fringe group of people who deal with hierarchy well. Which was my original point anyway… beyond using bamboo carts to transport food into the cities (and humanure out).
Once again, I don’t claim that there ARE such folk, only that they MAY exist. I make no claim for the positive or the negative.
I can’t figure out why you seem so utterly repulsed by this idea. If my mind can mesh it with no problem, why does it seem to be such a big deal here?
- Chuck
Comment by Chuck — 19 January 2006 @ 10:46 AM
That’s exactly what I’m saying, though. Even those who benefit most materially are working 80 or more hours a week, they never see their families, they die of stress-related disorders or they kill themselves. Even they aren’t happy with it. When I talk to them, even they fantasize about being able to live out in the woods….
It’s the implication of it. If someone prefers hierarchy for hierarchy’s sake … I mean, my G-d, think of what a person would be. Most of us can see that sharing, respect, freedom, etc. are all good things in principle. We may disagree on how to achieve them, but you’re talking about someone who sees terror, domination and invincibility as good in and of themselves. A villain with no motivation–a being of pure evil without any redeeming motivation or core. Someone who enjoys evil for its own sake. Even Hitler was motivated by the same things that motivate us–he just had different ideas of how to go about it. Satan is motivated by the same things that motivate us. You’re talking about a being that’s more pure in its evil than that. You’re talking about something that’s not even recognizable as an animal anymore.
No, it would mean that they believed that hierarchy was the best way to achieve freedom, sharing, respect, etc. The basic motivations would be the same–it would only be our means of attaining them that differ. Such a person could not be characterized as “enjoying hierarchy”–they would, rather, be someone who sees hierarchy as an acceptable means to an end, a price worth paying, but not something good in itself. That I can understand. I’ve met many such people, and I understand them quite well. But that’s a very different thing from someone who genuinely enjoys hierarchy itself.
OK, well, here’s my thinking on it.
There may be people who enjoy hierarchy in its own right. Such people, then, enjoy commanding others, and enjoy being a slave to others. Their cruelty is matched only by their cowardice–such must be the nature of someone who would genuinely appreciate hierarchy.
Such beings must not be suffered to exist–their very existence is a threat to all life. If such beings exist, then the human race must be exterminated to wipe out any possibility of such beings continuing to exist. We must all join the voluntary human extinction movement immediately, and begin plans to make the entire human race infertile to ensure our destruction.
There’s my conclusion, if such a thing is possible. But, I cannot concieve of how such a thing could be. Simply biologically, how could such a thing arise?
Comment by Jason Godesky — 19 January 2006 @ 11:25 AM
Jason,
In regards to the city situation:
We’ll see. History is, after all, a much better judge of our future than we are.
- Chuck
Comment by Chuck — 19 January 2006 @ 3:02 PM
No doubt.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 19 January 2006 @ 3:04 PM
Janene, check this out:
http://www.emilycompost.com/bookworms.htm#“Gardening%20Without%20Work”
On this we can agree; that hierarchy is an evil as to it’s end result. Anyone knowingly particpating in it is evil. However, many are ignorant as to the result of hierarchy.
Comment by Rick Larson — 19 January 2006 @ 10:20 PM
Yes, but to actually enjoy hierarchy, whether you’re ignorant of its effects or not … to enjoy it, you would need to enjoy being chattle to another. You would also have to enjoy having chattle of your own. It reminds me of C.S. Lewis’s description of demons in The Screwtape Letters.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 20 January 2006 @ 11:32 AM
Thanks to all for the comments on my “Urban and Rural Sustainability” article. A deeper look and a reply to some of the many comments I received elsewhere appeared in Permaculture Activist #58 and is posted at http://www.patternliteracy.com/urban2.html
The first post here by Jason Godesky shows a misunderstanding of what permaculture is. It is absolutely not horticulture. Making seedballs is not doing permaculture, although it may apply some permaculture principles better than, say, tillage (done by most horticulturists). I can’t do it justice here, but permaculture is a whole-systems design approach based on principles derived from natural ecosystems and sustainable cultures. These are principles like “each element should serve multiple functions� and “catch and store energy and materials on the site.� It applies to designing buildings and communities as much as it does to food systems. Most people historically have come to permaculture through gardening, but I know plenty of permaculturists who don’t have gardens.
It’s true that my wife and I chose a site not well suited to food production. We bought it long before I took my first permaculture course. It had no water and poor soil, and was too isolated. Initially, with long days of work, we got what I’d call a good sustainable yield from the land while greatly restoring its ecological health, but after 7-8 years I found I liked to do other things besides farm, and scaled back my efforts. The techniques I’d been using were working well, and even with little work we were getting lots of food from the land; but that land really wanted to be forest and I was too aware of fighting it.
I’m not sure how people got the idea that I think cities are models of sustainability. They aren’t. My point was that most rural people use more resources, and are more dependent on cars and oil, than most urban dwellers. Contemporary rural life is even less sustainable than cities. 94% of all ruralites do not farm (US census data); they have regular jobs like city folk. So when the oil runs out, why would you expect that simply having a really big yard is going to save you when you and all your neighbors are out of work and far from where everything but (most) food is currently produced? Many cities until recently, especially in Europe, produced at least half their own food. Portland officials have calculated that within citi limits we have land to produce nearly 80% ofourown food, without cutting down extensive urban forest.
Cities before oil, and even up to the 1960s, were fed by rings of farms around them. Maybe that’s what suburbia will become, market gardens surrounding the cities. Many cities, like Portland, are built on and ringed by prime agricultural land. I have grown about 40% of my food needs on a fraction of my 5000-square-foot lot; how much more land do I need? I’m not saying post-oil will be a picnic, just that fleeing the cities is not the answer and is not necessary. Some say that cities are parasites on the surrounding land, but the surrounding population is just as dependent on cities for nearly everything but food: tools, medicine, culture, science, art, education, etc. It’s not parasitical, it’s symbiotic.
One more point: I wasn’t “accidentally” telling a story about community in my essay. That was the whole point: community is esential for sustainability, wherever you are.
I’m pleased that the article triggered so much discussion. Thanks for taking the time to comment on it.
Comment by Toby Hemenway — 24 January 2006 @ 3:27 PM
Hey Toby –
Thanks for stopping by and adding your comments. I read your follow up essay and while I disagree with some of your expectations, its all about healthy skepticism(on both our parts).
Anyway, I just wanted to comment on Jason’s statement of permaculture as a horticultural practice. What you did not see (as it is discussed elsewhere) is that Jason is using the Anthropological term horticulture: meaning cultivation as a portion of a cultures subsistance strategy, or more technically ‘cultivation below the point of diminishing returns.’ Not to be confused with the common usage term horticulture: meaning simply gardening. within Anthropology, the Native Americans using Three Sisters, and the amazonian natives using swidden techniques are both horticulture — as is permaculture, fukuoka seedballing and other ‘new’ techniques.
Janene
Comment by Janene — 24 January 2006 @ 4:41 PM
Mr. Hemenway, it’s a pleasure to have you here. A fellow member of our tribe, Steve Thomas, is a big fan of your work.
As Janene already pointed out, I think the discrepency has less to do with my misunderstanding of permaculture, than your misunderstanding of horticulture. Horticulture here refers to the anthropological category. Amazonian Indians, the Iroquois, and many, many others are indigenous examples of horticulturalists. The Lawa discussed by Koetke in “The Final Empire,” as recently cited by Gumph, are another kind of horticulturalist. Like permaculture, there is a consideration of sustainability, and an attempt to mimic the designs of nature. Like permaculture, cultivation is often supplemented with hunting. Most of permaculture’s most successful techniques have been used by horticulturalists for millions of years. I’m afraid there’s nothing you’ve said of permaculture that does not equally apply to other, indigenous horticulturalists.
I think your more recent article is much more clear, and though I think your characterization of collapse is dodgy at best, I must express my complete agreement with you that “going back to the land” is certainly a doomed strategy in itself, and that the key to survival is almost certainly community.
A lot more, I would think. It’s not just the percentage of food that matters, but also the type. The food you’re growing is probably the most land area efficient stuff, but how much protein is coming from that? If you’re going to get your protein from meat, you’ll need to either hunt it (necessitating large, nearby wilderness), or raise it (necessitating lots of grazing land).
I think your characterization of “rings of farms” is slightly misleading, though. Ancient and medieval cities were fed by their hinterlands, yes, but your phrase makes that seem almost small. A city’s hinterland stretched for a hundred miles in every direction. They needed a significant population of farmers working an enormous amount of land to supply enough food for them, and that was completely unsustainable. The cities died as the land did. The cities were enormous leeches that bled huge, thriving ecosystems until they were dead. These were no minor “rings of farms,” but enormous blights on the earth itself. The Industrial Revolution was a revolution of degree, not kind.
Ecological footprint ultimately only tells part of the story. Population growth is so explosive in the Third World because the ecological footprint is so small. In the First World, our footprints are much larger, so our population growth stabilizes. Hunter-gatherers have been the most ecologically friendly people to ever live, but their ecological footprints were much larger than even the most ostentatious American. The Agricultural Revolution shrank that footprint significantly, and the Industrial Revolution shrank it again. So, obviously, the size of one’s ecological footprint is not nearly so straightforward a metric as we might at first imagine.
I tend not to separate cities and their hinterlands much, myself. You’re right, they rely on each other. I see them both as an enormously destructive parasite on the ecology that they slowly kill off–but a single entity, at that.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 25 January 2006 @ 11:54 AM
Thanks for the warm welcome to this discussion. I’ve been fascinated by the points made and impressed by the general civility and level of scholarship. Jason, I intend to read your essays in more detail shortly, as a quick skim has me intrigued.
First, a bit more to define permaculture. When I hear it described as horticulture, even in the anthropological sense of cultivation (thanks for the clarification, Janene), I think this is still shoe-horning it into too narrow a space. Permaculture is about designing human settlements, and of course land-tending is an important part of that, which is why so much of the early Pc literature and work is about food production. But Pc is a broad design tool for creating housing, villages, towns, businesses, and economies. I’ve even used it to help a struggling non-profit deal with its problems, so its principles can be applied to organizations as well.
Permaculture originated in Mollison’s insight that we might be able to design human ecosystems that function as well as natural ones, and he set out to determine the key principles and processes that create sustainable systems, based on nature and on longstanding indigenous cultures. One observation made over and over is that the cultural (social) aspect of permaculture is at least as important as the horticultural one. You can grow all the food you want, but if those practices are embedded within a corrupt or unsustainable social milieu, you won’t last long.
There was some earlier discussion here and elsewhere of whether you can do permaculture anywhere. The principles can be applied anywhere, I’m firmly convinced, but permaculture is grounded in ethical precepts, too. And one of those is the injunction that we should not convert any more wild land into human habitat (or, as Mollison says, “stay out of the bush.�). I don’t doubt that someone could go into the desert or arctic and effectively apply permaculture (after all, much of Pc is based on what inhabitants of those regions know). But we shouldn’t. There is so much degraded, abandoned land that is a much more proper place for our efforts. (I agree that in some marginal landscapes a hunter-gatherer approach makes sense. Though their ecological footprint may be large in terms of area, the intensity of impact over that area is diffuse unless they kill off keystone species, whereas cultivation tends to be heavier impact over less area per capita)
The “how much land do we need for our food� is an interesting question that has been long debated. There was a fellow working with John Jeavons near Willits, California who spent a year living only on what he’d grown. I believe he did it for a second year as well. His farm was about 4000 square feet (1/25 Ha), and he worked roughly 40 hours a week on his land (more in spring and fall, less in summer and winter) . That land also grew his compost crops for fertility, which needs to be included for a fair accounting. You need roughly 2/3 of your land to grow compost crops rather than importing fertilizer. I don’t see anything about his using humanure, which you’d want to do. A key element here is to focus on soil health, and then the rest follows. Lose your soil and you’re dead.
This person didn’t raise meat. However, ideal animals that could have been worked into this system are chickens, rabbits, ducks, and fish. Garden byproducts are easily turned into chickens and rabbits; they make far more sense for small-scale operations than large livestock. And aquaculture has immense potential. Not only can you grow roughly 1600 kg/Ha per year of tilapia (and it scales down very well) but since tilapia are herbivores, you can add omnivores like carp and carnivores like bass into the system with no significant loss of tilapia. And you can grow a lot of vegetation in aquaculture. They are supremely nestable systems that you can stack a lot into. I’ve worked with aquaculture mostly in warm climates but know people doing it in Virginia and Pennsylvania.
So 4000 square feet could yield all the food and fertility needed to feed one person, and probably more if you’re smart about stacking, albeit with a bunch of work. (I think the area could be smaller, too, because there’s a lot of fertility in public spaces or other surplus that could be gathered; you’d have to figure out how much so as not to deplete those places).
If you combine these ideas with perennial plantings; tree crops for fiber, construction, and fuel; water catchment (most house’s roofs in all but deserts can catch enough water for their occupants) and a keen eye toward offering habitat with multi-functional plants, you may have the beginnings of a transitional system for a post-oil world. I think of places like Bali that are intensely cultivated, densely populated, but have been doing well for centuries to millennia.
I’m not saying this will work for sure or that it will be easy; it’s rarely been done in western culture, and certainly not on any scale. But if urban lots and the suburbs were converted to these systems instead of frickin’ lawns, we’d be enormously less dependent on massive farms extending over millions of square miles to feed the cities. As Jason points out, the key is to avoid degrading the local (and global) ecosystem, and from what I’ve seen permaculture design do, it can not only avoid degradation, it can regenerate ecosystems, at least on a modest scale (up to 200Ha or so) in work done to date. The question is, since all that’s been done so far are local efforts embedded in and supported by an oil culture, what happens when you remove the oil prop? We need to get this stuff in place before that prop disappears.
Comment by Toby Hemenway — 25 January 2006 @ 2:17 PM
Hey –
Good point, Toby, on ‘permaculture is more than just horticulture.’ I do often forget that because I am currently spending so much of my time and energy on guilding and design work in the garden, specifically. Hopefully, in time, my approach will become much more rounded as I get a firm handle on each of the different pieces.
I’ll be very interested to hear your thoughts as you peruse the other theses and discussions. Although Jason and I have very specific points of disagreement (as you will find), most of our concerns here have focused on the practical natures of people and society and how to work with those characteristics rather than opposing or trying to alter them. In that way, I think it is all rather compatable with permaculture on a philosophical level.
Janene
Comment by Janene — 25 January 2006 @ 7:11 PM
Hmmm … such a definition seems so broad as to negate all meaning. I can appreciate “horticulture” as meaningful, and “ecological” as meaningful, but this definition of “permaculture” just seems like a synonym for “not stupid.” I suppose I agree with Ran’s comments of yesterday:
The waste that is supposedly the antithesis of permaculture is a recent phenomenon, a consequence of our fossil fuel subsidies and the fact that, well, we can. That will change very soon. So what is it that separates a medieval serf from an Australian Aborigine?
This is why my interests have tended more towards archaeology and anthropology. We have examples of societies that work, and societies that don’t. The theory of permaculture seems sound, but so far it’s just that–theory. I think it’s a much safer bet to examine the actual, living societies that work, see what they have in common, and then do that.
I agree entirely with this, but I think it’s also important to understand how those two create one another. The way in which you make your living will form your social milieu. Only under exceptional circumstances can you have hierarchical foragers, or egalitarian farmers. Modes of production predispose a society in one direction or another–usually, very strongly. I wrote about this in detail in Thesis #8: Human societies are defined by their food.
Historically, ethical injunctions have a way of being broken. If there’s a structural reason to prevent something, that’s usually quite effective, but if the only thing stopping us is “ethics,” then someone is going to do it anyway. If it’s an action that yields a competitive advantage, the rest of us will have little choice but to do likewise or be eliminated–it’s a game of prisoner’s dilemna, and an ethical injunction becomes the same as a cartel. As we all know, all cartels eventually fail.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 26 January 2006 @ 10:34 AM
I should have written “sustainable human settlements,” but I realize that doesn’t narrow it much (other that toss out most of what’s been built in the last 200 years!). But is that better than the definition of anthroplogy as “the science of human beings” (Webster)?
One of the difficulties with permaculture is that it is very difficult to define in less than several paragraphs, in part because much of it is antithetical to what Westerners learn in school. For example, it focuses on relationships and processes, rather than on things (verbs, not nouns), and our culture is very, very big on things.
I’ll belabor the point only a bit more: The relationship of permaculture to horticulture is similar to that between architecture and carpentry. Architecture is the design of structures, while carpentry is one of the most often used bodies of technique for carrying out those designs. Architecture doesn’t “include” carpentry, but for architecture to be carried out, someone needs to be doing carpentry and masonry and wiring and plumbing in accordance with the design, and the architect needs to know something about those skills. There is a similar relationship between permaculture and bodies of technique like horticulture, natural building, energy systems, etc..
And in a way you’re right about it being a synonym for “not stupid.” Most people, when they get the concepts, say, “But it makes so much sense.” However, so much of what I see being built or created is simply stupid: subdivisions wherein each house could easily be oriented properly to the sun but isn’t, and so on. I agree that the principles seem self-evident, but they are so often ignored (as you say, largely because we can afford to ignore them still). And blind application of technique without the principles allows people to do stupid things. Lots of permaculturists get infatuated with something called an herb spiral, a design that illustrates several permacultural ideas. But I’ve seen many, many abandoned herb spirals because people fell in love with the technique and didn’t ask: do they really need all those herbs, is it in the right place, what’s my relationship with this thing.
In our culture design has, until recently, been about either making things pretty or making things that don’t fall down. There’s been no notion of ecological appropriateness, cultural impact, and other hard questions like those. Permaculture and related fileds are first attempts at codifying what makes designs “sustainable” in the sense of not depleting a resource base. We’re even wrestling with issues like how to make a design culturally appropriate (which is a real swamp, but I’ve got great stories about culturally inappropriate designs).
Absolutely. Mollison and many other developers of the ideas lived with and studied many different peoples whose cultures were long-lasting, and permaculture’s principles (and many techniques) are a distillation of what they learned. I know this is an obvious point, but you don’t just live with the Haida or !Kung and then do what they do back in your own culture. Permaculture is an attempt to extract universal principles from “sustainable” cultures and ecosystems.
Excellent. I will read Thesis #8.
I’d like to explore this a bit more. Obviously an injunction like “don’t murder” isn’t based upon a structural ethic; we just have laws against it, and those laws are broken when it pays off. I’m assuming by “structural” you mean something stronger than a law, like dire consequences stemming directly from the act (more like “don’t cut toward yourself.”) So when the effects of an action, like cutting down all your forest, are apparent only slowly, yet there are structural reasons (I’d say) for not doing it, how do we prevent it from happening? We can say “stay out of the bush” and develop a storytelling tradition around it showing why it’s a bad idea, but that seems pretty weak. How does a culture, or individuals, avoid doing stupid things when the consequences aren’t obvious but still critically important.
At least with “stay out of the bush” you can point to someone doing it and say. “That’s not permaculture.” But you’re right, that’s not effective except to those willing to be bound by the injunction. So how do some cultures learn to create taboos against cutting their forest down?
[note: the blockquoting I’ve added did not show up in the preview, so I can only hope it does upon posting. If not, my apologies]
Comment by Toby Hemenway — 26 January 2006 @ 3:23 PM
This is where I take my cues from indigenous peoples. Richard Lee noted a custom among the !Kung called “cursing the meat.” If a hunter wasn’t appropriately modest, everyone would make fun of his catch, about how lean and stringy and tough it was, how small, “Oh, was this all you could catch?” A custom like that makes it impossible for a hunter to consolidate prestige, so the process of hierarchy formation is cut off at the most basic level. No culture with this custom could ever develop its own concept of hierarchy. That’s what I call a structural obstruction.
An ethical injunction like “stay out of the bush” is just begging to be broken. The first group that decides to break it will have more food than his competitors, and they’ll be able to succeed at their competitors’ expense. This is what makes me nervous about horticulture in general–there’s nothing structural keeping them from taking over the whole planet. Foragers have a structural obstruction: they can’t increase their food supply. They catch what they catch, and they gather what they gather. There’s a natural carrying capacity that they really can’t change. Cultivators can change that, though, just by intensifying their cultivation.
Now, if horticulture truly is sustainable–and it’s only been around for 10,000 years, just like agriculture, so it’s still uncertain whether it really is, or if it’s just slightly less unsustainable than agriculture–then I think it has to be partly forager. Where horticulturalists are also foragers, and dependent on hunting for their protein, then the maintenance of wilderness is not a matter of ethics. It’s a structural obstruction. Destroying your wilderness is destroying your range, and thus immediately damaging your access to meat. Someone wiping out your wilderness is akin to someone wiping out your garden. If horticulture really is sustainable (and I suspect that it is), then I think this is probably the key to their success.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 26 January 2006 @ 3:37 PM
Hey –
Yesterday, I read Toby’s piece on Seeing the Garden in the Jungle. (and I very much enjoyed it :-)) It exemplifies the ideas I am working on re: permaculture. Specifically, I am less in love with the zone ideas — although in some specific cases they are certainly relevant — and I feel like the ultimate expression of permaculture would be the ‘wild’ land with pockets of food-bearing plants of all types popping up all around, munched on by various wild, semi wild and still-domesticated animals.
Jason, if you have not read this one, I would suggest it, as I would love to hear your impressions, and see how you feel about the ’structural’ limitations inherant in such a system. It seems to me that beyond the obvious, an environment like this, where there is no dividing line between ‘my plants’, ‘wild plants’, ‘domestic animals’, ‘wild animals’ etc would create an environment (specifically a mental environment) where alternative ‘assumptions’ are reinforced. (as opposed to the driving assumptions of civilization that we talk about so much.)
Janene
Comment by Janene — 26 January 2006 @ 4:44 PM
“Now, if horticulture truly is sustainable–and it’s only been around for 10,000 years, just like agriculture”
Can you really be so sure about that? If horticulture in the past was more similar to permaculture, or say the Kayapo, how much evidence would it really leave to examine later. Didn’t they find poppies in graves 30,000 years old? I know they have found fossilized poppy seeds associated with neanderthals and poppies in there graves. That is just one small example, and of course they could have easily gathered them, but what is to stop a forager from consciously increasing the supply of his favorite plants by one way or another. Wouldn’t that be technically horticulture, and also virtually impossible to trace archaelogically? I’m just trying to say the line between foraging and horticulture is a lot fuzzier than you make it sound here (and I know elsewhere you have written of symbiosis between the two, but I’m not talking about horticulturalists that forage, but also foragers that “horticulture”.
One tried and proven method of enforcing structural injunctions where the negative effects aren’t immediately apparent is religion (forget morals and ethics, much too squishy and rational, hence prone to rationalization). For instance, the Hawaiians considered the mountain jungles the home of the gods, so it was dangerous and sacreligous to trespass there, let alone clear them for their horticultural plots. I know I keep using examples from the same culture, but I think islands are some of the best places to research sustainable cultures, because the limited resource base necessitates some fast learning of sustainable strategies. They also happen to be the culture I am the most familiar with (besides Empire, of course).
By the way, its really great to have you here Mr. Hemenway, I just ordered Gaia’s Garden, and from what I read in the library, it’s already my favorite gardening book (I like Fukuoka’s books a lot too). I love the internet.
Comment by limukala — 26 January 2006 @ 5:31 PM
I forgot to say, the reason staying out of the montane jungles was so important, besides protection of endemic species, was of course, watershed. I think a lot of valid knowledge get encoded in, or at least served by traditional religious beliefs.
Comment by limukala — 26 January 2006 @ 5:33 PM
Toby’s description of swidden in the article in general meshes with my understanding of it, though I think it glosses over the fact that it often walks the razor’s edge of sustainability. More recently, charity to Amazonian swidden horticulturalists has caused a population explosion, and with that the pace of swidden horticulture has been picked up. Now, they’re no longer leaving sufficient fallow periods, and the result is that native tribes are contributing as much to rain forest deforestation as lumbering companies and ranchers.
That said, it seems like the difference between domestication and co-evolution, between being part of an ecology and trying to control that ecology. It’s the “non-stupid” way of growing your food, that’s for sure. I, too, am skeptical about the usefulness of something as strictly delineated as “zones” (though the principle behind it is certainly sound), but, like you said, the blurring of those lines is the very thing that moves one away from domestication, and into co-evolution and co-existence.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 26 January 2006 @ 5:33 PM
Well, for one thing, domestication is a genetic process, so you can track how long a plant or animal has been domesticated that way. We can find archaeological artifacts, too; before the Neolithic, they’re forager tools. Only since the beginning of the Holocene have we found any kind of tools for cultivation.
Hoes, trowels, etc. … those are horticulturalists’ tools, and they survive quite well. Also, villages, which I’ll get to in a minute.
It is a fuzzy line, and I think you summed it up well: “horticulturalists that forage, but also foragers that ‘horticulture.’” But it is a fairly important distinction, and I think the difference can probably be pinned down to transhumance. Foragers are nomadic; horticulturalists live in settled villages. That seems like a pretty good dividing line to me, but villages leave archaeological evidence behind (even if all the buildings are made of impermanent materials, there’s still postholes).
Not so. Religion changes all the time to reflect the new material reality. Just ask any Talmudic scholar. If it profits a society to believe the gods want them to do X, even if they currently believe the gods want them to do Y, guess what? There will be a prophet.
Absolutely! And usually it’s another means of adaptation. But, if it conveys a competitive advantage, someone is eventually going to do it and rewrite the religious rules. The key is to deny the advantage that would otherwise be gained.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 26 January 2006 @ 5:59 PM
When I was speaking of horticulture older than 10,000 years, I was thinking of extremely low-tech versions that would be impossible to trace by any means. Namely, reseeding the plants you like to eat in place you know they will do will, and maybe eliminating some of the competition. The roots of horticulture. This level of intervention wouldn’t need more technology than a stick, but would still be some degree of horticulture, and more in line my my ideal level of it. Sort of an extremely relaxed version of Janene’s “permaculturists as enablers.” This would also mesh well into a nomadic life, and I’m not so sure it would produce such definite differences in the genetic structure, would it? It would be difficult to select for plants with non-wild properties since noone would be there to constantly nurture them along.
Comment by limukala — 26 January 2006 @ 9:45 PM
At that level, we’re looking at the fuzzy line of co-evolution (which is as old as self-replicating amino acids), and cultivation (which is 10,000 years old). That, I have no doubt, went on for much longer.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 26 January 2006 @ 11:51 PM
Now that I understand the specialized use of the word “cultivation’ (vocabulary is always a barrier between different fields), I’ve got to say I’m very excited at having been pointed to Yehudi Cohen’s work through Thesis #8. Cohen’s classification explains much to me, and allows a lot of concepts I’ve been juggling to finally settle into an intelligible relationship. I think I need to read “Man in Adaptation.â€?
The lines that separates cultivation from foraging and agriculture are indeed blurry, and new scholarship is making them blurrier. As Jason says, cultivation probably needs foraging to remain sustainable, but it also seems that foragers have graded into cultivation much more often that was previously thought. There’s been evidence that the species mix in regions of the Amazon are statistically tilted more toward food- and fiber-bearing plants than one would expect. (From a paper by Janice Alcorn but I don’t remember which one without digging for it.) And ethnobotanist Nancy Turner’s new book “Keeping It Living: Traditions Of Plant Use And Cultivation On The Northwest Coast Of North America� describes cultivation of wapato, camas, and other crops by Kwakiutl, Haida, and others. (This may explain NW coast peoples’ relative wealth a little better than the salmon harvest alone. But those are still region-specific crops and thus don’t encourage expansionism.)
Thesis #8 describes the spiritual beliefs of foragers. I don’t yet know what the beliefs of cultivators tend toward, but I assume they are not unlike those of foragers. This helps me understand why nearly every permaculturist I’ve encountered is animist, Buddhist, or New Age Earth-spiritist, and almost never monotheist (at worst, duotheistic with a God and Goddess). Could it be that cultivator culture is still alive among many of us, just buried in an industrial-agrarian society? And this explains why I’ve never liked the “humans as stewards� idea; it’s just dominion given a nice name and pretending we know what we’re doing.
It’s true that swidden culture “often walks the razor’s edge of sustainability.â€? Surplus food equals more population equals a too-rapid swidden-fallow cycle. That’s why I’m a bit alarmed by Thesis #8’s statement that
My alarm is because one of the things permaculturists are attempting is to reduce or eliminate the fallow period with minimal loss of fertility or biodiversity by using nitrogen-fixing and other fertility-building species; stacking trees, shrubs, and perennial herbaceous plants to maintain standing biomass; partnering with bacterial, fungal, and animal associates; and using multifunctional species and non-food plants to maintain ecosystem functions and not just food yield. I’ve always thought of this as a good thing, but I can see that elimination of fallow steers you toward a lot of the drawbacks of agriculture: storage of large surplus, population growth, etc. So even if a permacultural or cultivator approach promoted essentially intact ecosystem function, the culture might behave more like an agricultural one, if I understand what Cohen is saying. Hmm.
The upside is, a permaculture approach does encourage foraging. In Pc parlance, you’d fence your zone one and two (which are quite small anyway) to keep out unwanted animals, but hunt in the outer zones. Maybe the role of foraging would balance the negative effect of agriculture?
I very much share Janene’s vision that
Some people talk about the Earth as a garden, and that’s a little too domesticated for me, but a wilderness that let’s us sometimes act as if we’re in a garden, or a garden that behaves like a wilderness, I find very appealing.
Comment by Toby Hemenway — 27 January 2006 @ 2:26 AM
“An ethical injunction like “stay out of the bush” is just begging to be broken. The first group that decides to break it will have more food than his competitors, and they’ll be able to succeed at their competitors’ expense. This is what makes me nervous about horticulture in general–there’s nothing structural keeping them from taking over the whole planet.”
This is a real concern… is there really nothing structural to prevent this from occurring? I think think we need to ask the following question: has horticulture taken over the world before? I think the answer is “not really”. I would say that limukala’s “foragers that horticulture” (Indians burning off the plains and the eastern woodlands, for example) have dominated the planet, but primarily horticulture-based societies have not. So, I don’t think we have to fear the horticulturalists - they have failed to take over the world in the past, and presumably will fail again in the future.
Permaculture appears to be something different, or course. It shows signs of being able to support horticulturalists who forage, or even plain straight-forward horticulturalists, over much of the planet’s surface, counter to what has happened in the past, as just described. Why the difference? what would allow Permaculturalists to succeed and dominate the planet when horticultulturalists have failed? Why would the rules have changed? The answer, as Toby Hemenway mentions in one of his posts here, is oil, and all the other things that come with it. I think it may be the case that without the support mechanism of a rich material civilisation, Permaculture could become no more successful than any other horticulture-based system.
In other words, to put it in Jason’s terms, Permaculture as we know (and fear?) it is as dependent on interaction with civilisation as pastoralists appear to be on interaction with farmers, at least in the initial stages.
P.S. Toby: I’m glad you are also alarmed by some of what Permaculture is trying to do. I think the anthropological side of things needs closer examination in Permaculture circles, especially since Permaculturalists tend to be receptive to these kinds of ideas.
Comment by Clive — 27 January 2006 @ 2:40 AM
I suppose what I’m trying to say in my own clumsy way, is that what makes Permaculture different is it’s ability to take advantage of the fruits of civilisation, such as scientific research, crop breeding, domesticated animals and boreholes. These raise the ceiling of productivity and so mean that Permaculture systems can, whilst civilisation is still knocking about, be extremely productive and, more importantly, intensify using whatever novelties civilisation has come up with. Tribal horticulturalists do not have access to these kinds of resources, so they don’t tends to spread beyond certain limits.
But even if many elements of Permaculture would disappear with civilisation, other significant features could still remain, such as the research and development side. So perhaps, post collapse, what we have to fear is aggressively research orientated societies of Permaculturalists, ignoring Mollison’s opinions on population reduction and fiendishly dedicating every moment of their increasingly abundant free time to crop reseach and the breeding ever more abundant acorn-based polycultures, planting food-forests as they conquer tribe after tribe…
The horror, the horror…
Comment by Clive — 27 January 2006 @ 7:25 AM
I think you’re still misunderstanding the usage here. I’ve attempted to give a more rigid criteria to intuitively understood terms, so I’ve adopted “cultivation” as the umbrella term to encompass all behaviors geared towards the regrowth of favored plants. So, horticulture and agriculture are two types of cultivation. You seem to be using “cultivation” for “horticulture,” though.
That’s my suspicion, and my hope. Foragers rely on large ranges of wild land. Cultivation relies on carefully-tended areas reserved for human food alone. I think if there’s any kind of sustainable cultivation, it would have to depend on some amount of foraging, so that the maintenance of wild lands moves from the area of luxury, charity or ethics, into the realm of practical necessities of survival.
True, and here’s where we get into some really tough questions. It took 10,000 years for agriculture to take over the world, and I think we all here recognize how intensely destructive that is. What if horticulture is really destructive, just slightly less so than agriculture? Above, Toby points to indication that even in 10,000 years, with competition from much more expansionistic agricultural societies, horticulturalists may have become extremely widespread. What if horticulture just takes 20,000 years to destroy the planet, rather than 10,000? What if it’s just as unsustainable, but over a slightly longer timeline?
We don’t know–we can’t know. This is why I remain suspicious of horticulture. But, if it’s going to work, as I’ve said above, I think the key is foraging.
I’m reminded of the early scientists working on the first atomic research, intending their discoveries for peaceful pursuits, and how crushed they were when it was used as a weapon.
Innovation is so rarely used towards the ends we intend it for.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 27 January 2006 @ 11:19 AM
Am not convinced that foraging will be the end-all as horticulture is self-sustaining and will surely establish a power base post collapse. Even if it takes 20,000 years (this is only an asumption), all of those willing to establish this style will not care a lick if it otherwise meant death.
The real idea behind hunting/foraging only, is to maintain the human genome as long as is possible. And to this point I can certainly agree (specially in regards to how this site has presented these ideas). However, someday the sun will explode, or our universe will collide with another, so in the end it is all the same. You think?
The test for me will be to learn hunting/foraging and compare it to a horticulture/hunting life. Which is more satisfying will be the answer for me.
Comment by Rick Larson — 30 January 2006 @ 11:50 PM
Humans will be long gone before the sun’s death will become an issue. (Besides, we’d all be dead when the sun became a red giant. No nova nessesary.) Homo afterus will have to deal with that, assuming our genus survives, of course.
Comment by Benjamin Shender — 31 January 2006 @ 1:04 AM
Rick — after all that, you’re still foggy on this? Horticulture without foraging is unsustainable; foraging without horticulture is naive. It’s a spectrum. The question is not which one, but where on that spectrum you feel most comfortable.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 31 January 2006 @ 12:30 PM
Sorry; just carelessness. All those “cult” words: horticulture, permaculture, agriculture, cultivation. Right: Horticulture is one form of cultivation.
So it seems that one of the most significant divides in terms of human effects on ecosystems is that between foraging and horticulture. In foraging we are just another species living off of ecosystem yield, with a tight linkage between carrying capacity and human population. But in horticulture we are significantly modifying ecosystem composition and function, and must ask if those modifications eventually result in loss of critical functions.
There are other species that significantly alter ecosystems yet seem to have established a balance over the long term. Keystone species like beaver drastically alter species composition, edge, diversity, food webs, and many other processes. The loss of the beaver in the US Northwest–400 million pelts sent to Europe–has terrifically simplified valley ecosystems so that we hardly remember what a real valley looked like: rivers became channelized instead of being braided, wet meadows dried up, woody browse changed to grass, fire became more frequent. And there are other keystones besides beavers: otters, elephants, earthworms. So there are examples of species modifying their ecosystems yet preserving function.
If we return to horticulture as a principal human approach, we need either to develop structural restraints upon our impairing ecosystem function, or, less satisfactorily, develop really good cultural and scientific tools for understanding what the primary indicators of ecosystem health are and how to get feedback from those indicators to evaluate our impact.
If we can do that, it might reduce the advantage given to someone who moves from horticulture to agriculture in a world of limited energy resources. Agriculture, we know, gets many of its advantages from capturing energy yields from outside the ag system and using them on the farm. But if outside resources are scarce or are otherwise being used for other important functions, someone shifting to ag will just deplete their soil quickly and attract a lot of pests.
Also, I’ll agree that agriculture is most likely not sustainable in any form, but the fact that it’s only taken 10,000 years to hit the limits of what the planet can bear is also due to a huge acceleration of agriculture’s impact from industrialization. Bulldozers are a an order of magnitude or two faster and more damaging than fire or axes. Maybe we could have lasted another 5000-10,000 years if we hadn’t industrialized. So its possible that horticulture, even if it’s only half as destructive as agriculture, could give us something like 30,000-40,000 years before we disrupt global processes. By then we’re into another Ice Age and with that, in many ways the clock gets reset (remineralization, species shifts. etc., etc.). Maybe. But I’ll agree that domesticating the entire planet via horticulture without overtaxing life-support systems is probably beyond us; we need the majority of ecosystems to be left for foraging.
Mollison was on the right track with permaculture in his understanding that although industrial culture is monstrous, the heart of the problem lies with agriculture. Permaculture spends a good deal of energy on ways that surplus can be reinvested safely in the systems that generate it. It’s a recognition that surplus, made possible by agriculture, is a huge source of trouble, since then you have to deal with who controls it and how, and then deal with all that stems from those systems of control. Those are some of the pieces that this discussion has helped me get in perspective.
Comment by Toby Hemenway — 31 January 2006 @ 5:06 PM
Toby,
“If we return to horticulture as a principal human approach, we need either to develop structural restraints upon our impairing ecosystem function, or, less satisfactorily, develop really good cultural and scientific tools for understanding what the primary indicators of ecosystem health are and how to get feedback from those indicators to evaluate our impact.”
How might we go about developing structural restraints? It seems to me that they are either there or they are not, and that human intentions don’t have too much to do with it. What are you thinking of here?
Comment by Clive — 31 January 2006 @ 5:40 PM
You know Clive, I imagine we could impose structural constraints similar to how the Hopi did it, by ritualizing behavior. That’s just a thought, though.
Best
Bill Maxwell
Comment by Bill Maxwell — 31 January 2006 @ 6:38 PM
Hey –
I think that it may be that in a ‘true’ permaculture scenario, the structural constraint IS the system itself. What I mean is that in any given scenario, ‘we’ can choose to intensify production. However, in permaculture, if the system is functionaing at peak efficiency (ie for nature, not for us), then any human intensification should decrease what we get out of it.
File this under ‘Things I believe but cannot prove’ — at least for now
Janene
Comment by Janene — 31 January 2006 @ 6:43 PM
Alternatively, without oil we would have run into the ground that much faster. Remember, oil didn’t just accelerate, it allowed us to continue expanding far beyond the limits of the soil. Without it we might very well have peaked much sooner.
Besides, agriculture is very finiky. It needs very specific climate, soil, and a high-yield dense plant. The only one in existance right now are cereal grains. It’s possible that another might be around in a couple thousand years, but it’s also possible everything else has changed. The number of things that must coincide in order to start agriculture are each rare. And only once have they all coincided. (Note: agriculture was invented in different places, not different times. And the environments in question were about as similar as any two environments get.)
You can always encurage a plant to be more prolific in a specific region, but you can’t be an agricutluralist just anywhere and anywhen with any plant.
Comment by Benjamin Shender — 31 January 2006 @ 9:33 PM
This is keeper. Thanks, Ben, you genus genius!
Comment by JCamasto — 1 February 2006 @ 12:11 AM
Thanks. I was wondering if anyone noticed that.
Comment by Benjamin Shender — 1 February 2006 @ 1:25 AM
Hey –
Somehow I missed this discussion. Darn. Hope it’s not too late to join the party.
I’m coming from a different angle on this, seeing agriculture and human society from the angle of systems thinking. I see agriculture as part of the Food Race, wherein agriculture and population growth go hand in hand, combining to form one of the most insidious reinforcing feedback loops in the history of human society. Literally “the worst mistake in the history of the human race.”
Now, what agriculture has led us to is a completely different structure of society, one categorized by hierarchy, centralization, and concentration of surplus and human population. This structure of society tends to be a vicious cycle of its own, with hierarchy fueling ever greater separation between the rich and the poor, ever greater consumption of “resources” (I hate seeing the Earth in this frame, but for now this word will have to do), and ever greater numbers of the human animal. Along with these things have come expansion and thus war as we know it — as these cancerous agricultural societies depleted their resource base where they were, they would look outward in the “takeover” method, exterminating whole societies and appropriating their resources. This led to the development of civilization and empire, something never before seen in the history of humanity.
This new form of social organization was marked by cities and intensive agricultural cultivation. As the Wikipedia article I linked to above explains in a section disambiguating uses of the word,
Jason has characterized what these cities have looked like for the majority of their existence, with farms stretching for miles around each metropolis.
This is the context for this entire discussion so far. We are looking at two of the aspects of the same civilization – urban settlements versus rural settlements – and attempting to compare which of the two will be a better location to reside in during the collapse OF civilization. If this is the context, we are not going to have a very fruitful discussion, as in both of these instances, if there is a collapse, the potential for survival is not very high.
So do we attempt to perpetuate this system (i.e. not collapse), or do we allow millions of people to die? Questions of this nature to me smack of hubris – they assume that we have control of our population. But for the moment let us indulge in this hubris and pretend that we really do have the option of deciding the fate of civilization. Having allowed the hypothetical that it is feasible, we can delve into a discussion of what is preferable. So – why on earth would we want to keep cities around? Ostensibly it is in order to reduce human suffering and the loss of human life, but I’m not so sure that if we were somehow to maintain these cities we would actually be doing ourselves much of a favor. We must firmly question our values here – is it better to keep as many humans as possible alive, even if to do so would result in perpetuating the miserable living conditions of the overwhelming majority of people in civilization? At the risk of being accused of condemning millions of people to death in this hypothetical scenario, my feeling is that no, it would not be better.
I think that for the most part the hubris of this question above is unsupportable. We (this generalized concept of humanity that I am invoking) no more control the fate of civilization than we control the weather or the processes of evolution. Although seeing ourselves as just another animal is complete anathema to our civilized psyches, it has now become an undeniable fact. We are thus subject to the same laws of ecology as every other species is, there is no “invisible hand” that guides us and forever ensures our success. Although we have grown so accustomed to the expectation of perpetual growth that we even have a field devoted to studying it (economics), it has become evident to all of those who keep their heads out of the sand that there are limits.
Here I am reminded of a presentation by Dr. Jason Bradford, comparing what he calls the “cornucopian” paradigm to an ecological one in the context of Peak Oil and population. He lists the following traits as making up the cornucopian paradigm.
He goes on to characterize the ecological paradigm as follows:
The ecological paradigm is well-supported by reality, whereas the cornucopian paradigm is not. However, people rarely believe things because they are true. The cornucopian paradigm is by far the predominant paradigm in society today.
These paradigms are mutually exclusive. So many of my attempts to discuss these subjects of Peak Oil and the collapse of civilization have been undermined by “cornucopians” declaring on blind faith that there are no limits, that humans are not animals, and that technology will save us. And no amount of evidence to the contrary will change their mind, as communicating across paradigms is like communicating across languages. It does not matter how many times I try to explain something in English to someone who only speaks German, they just won’t get it.
But if we can move past that impasse then there are very many useful insights from the ecological perspective that can help us understand our predicament. Familiar ecological concepts such as carrying capacity, overshoot, resource drawdown, and dieoff all factor in here, as we start to look at a human population the same way we would a population of reindeer or yeast.
William Catton wrote an entire book looking at human society from this ecological perspective. An excerpt from Chapter 10, Industrialization: Prelude to Collapse, made the Peak Oil and subsequent population problem hit home. Pardon its length, but reading this excerpt was a revelation for me.
Emphasis mine.
So it isn’t just food that sets the carrying capacity of a city. Food is merely one of the baseline factors and something we immediately think of. So we need to start seeing many other things being impacted by the scope reduction that will be caused by Peak Oil. No longer will we be able to have a composite carrying capacity on the scale of the entire world.
—-
Now. As you can see, this goes far beyond just a quick analysis of whether or not an urban or rural location will be a better place to survive or not. It gets into our fundamental assumptions about civilization as a social organization. It gets into questions of morality and ethics. It gets into discussions of limits, of our perceptions of ourselves as a species, and of the myriad paradigms we use to understand our world. It gets into our hopes and dreams about our future. When we try to think about our lives and about our society on such a scale, we’re almost getting in over our heads trying to piece it all together. It’s incredibly difficult to hold all the many threads together and come out with any kind of coherent picture of what’s going on.
So, to summarize what I’ve said. Often, implicit in the conversation about whether an urban environment versus a rural environment is more sustainable is the assumption of civilization. This assumption is one I think we should question for a number of reasons: civilization itself is not sustainable; civilization is characterized by hierarchy (oppression), division of labor (alienation), and settlements/centralization (stagnation and resource depletion); and because civilization is a pretty miserable way to live. Further, because civilization is unsustainable, any distinction between levels of urban and rural sustainability within the context of civilization is mostly arbitrary. Counter to the cornucopian paradigm, there are limits and humans are subject to laws of ecology such as Liebig’s Law of the Minimum. Both urban and rural areas will be subject to scope reduction due to Peak Oil; there are just as many rural areas as there are urban ones where the population has exceeded the local carrying capacity.
As for permaculture, the conclusion I have come to is that it is an excellent way to support a small community of people, but we (that generalized concept of humanity again) could not maintain our entire civilization with it. This comes from my understanding both of civilization’s need for resources and of scope enlargement. If we had not been able to extract and concentrate an entire world’s resources of surplus, something that occurred due to perpetual scope enlargement and resource drawdown of fossil fuels, then there would be nowhere near the number of people there are today. When these resources start running out, we will exceed our short-term, “phantom” carrying capacity and go into overshoot. And when a species goes into overshoot, it leads to die-off.
I didn’t support this last paragraph to my satisfaction, but this comment has already gotten way too long. Like, Jason’s-thesis-long. I think I’ll stop here for now.
- Devin
Comment by Devin — 1 February 2006 @ 2:51 AM
An interesting adjunct to this discussion: on a permaculture list I subscribe to, there’s been a conversation about whether ethanol from biomass can replace oil. One of the “pro” people cited a report that “farm and forest residues” could supply 30% of our current fuel needs.
http://feedstockreview.ornl.gov/pdf/billion_ton_vision.pdf
A perfect example of the industrial mindset: The paper is based on using all the “waste” from agriculture and logging, and converting it to fuel. The “waste” that currently builds soil, creates habitat, prevents erosion–they see it all as fuel, literally, for the machine and plan to use it. Their numbers apparently weren’t good enough at first so they added in assumptions of increasing grain yields by 50%, using all manure for fuel, converting all burned-out cropland back to farming, and so forth. And finally got 30% of our fuel use served, based on perfect efficiency. When I was editing science papers, I would have laughed those assumptions into the trash bin. What planet are these guys on? (Sadly, the one I must share with them!). I thought “ecosystem services” was a familiar concept, but I’m wrong. Using 40% of all photosynthesis on Earth isn’t enough for industrialism’s maw; they want it all.
This civilization really is in a big hurry to destroy itself, isn’t it?
Comment by Toby Hemenway — 1 February 2006 @ 5:48 PM
It seems that way. When I get someone talking like that I usually just say “waste product.” If they’re familiar with basic thermodynamics that usually leaves them with an “oh, duh” expression on their faces. It’s kind of funny in a sick, disgusting, and perverted way. Without oil we can’t even grow food. So to supplement our dwindling oil supplies we’re going to turn food into oil.
“And, on that day, everyone in the world smacked themselves on the head. Twice.”
Comment by Benjamin Shender — 2 February 2006 @ 1:11 AM
Am studying the information on this site because of having an instinct pointing towards how unsustainable life has become. But it was just an instinct.
The information here (and the supporting information from other sites linked here), has convinced me beyond any doubt that the penalty will be paid in my lifetime, and not sometime in the distant future as I had always believed.
So now I have a dilema.
Do I continue on and use the “profits” of my enterprize to place my family in a safer zone (again hastening the demise)? Or do I just stop all operation and just get on with the process of living a footprint below the natural carrying capacity of my area?
The logical answer would be to continue and use the profits, right? As it really won’t effect the outcome. But my conscience is wanting the later choice.
Comment by Rick Larson — 2 February 2006 @ 9:01 PM
An answer would be form a ‘tribe / co-housing group / intimate group of associates / etc.’ including your family and then, over the course of some time, phase yourself out. Unless your business is all stop or all go?
Best
Bill Maxwell
true[underscore]tom[at]pacbell[dot]net
Comment by Bill Maxwell — 2 February 2006 @ 9:37 PM
Sorry… should have added that I’m going through a similar thing in that I’m mired in the current civilization and need to support a family while mapping a strategy out…
Comment by Bill Maxwell — 2 February 2006 @ 9:39 PM
There is no reason to feel the slightest bit guilty about using the resources of civilization to free yourself from it. For one thing, the more energy that is put into civilization, the sooner it will burn itself out, and the less harmful it will be to the planet as a whole.
Another way to look at it is like stealing the weapons and tools of concentration camp guards in order to free some of the prisoners. No dilemna there right?
I guess the only problem then is the torture of remaining one more day in the rat race when you know a simpler, more pleasant alternative is right there for the taking. Just remember that the better prepared you are, the more likely your plans will succeed.
Comment by limukala — 3 February 2006 @ 12:57 AM
Not only is it ethical to use the resources of Empire againt Empire, ideally all of the resources of Empire would be used to make the transition.
- Chuck
Comment by Chuck — 3 February 2006 @ 1:22 AM
Hmm…Interesting.
However, I notice that while you have talked about cities and the countryside, you have not mentioned a thing about suburban areas–the areas surrounding cities.
They are not as dense as cities, and there is a lot more open land around them. There are also large areas of land that are dedicated to parking lots, shopping malls, and parks, and people have large lawns. Cities might be too dense to support themselves, but are suburbs too dense to support themselves with permaculture? I’m sure a permacultural suburb could provide for more of its food needs if the lawns became gardens, and parking lots and roads could be torn up and become grazing land for cattle.
In my suburban town most people have 1/4 to 1/2 acre lots that could be used for food production, and there are large parks from 4 to 10 acres, as well as large schoolyards, and there are also forest preserves with many wild animals that could be hunted. Is this neighborhood too dense to support itself without a hinterland, like a city?
Just curious. In other words, are suburbs doomed to collapse or starve without hinterlands? Are they too dense to support themselves?
Comment by harris_student — 7 October 2006 @ 12:11 PM
“harris_student,” are you Taylor with a new IP address and a new sock puppet?
I didn’t discuss suburbs because James Howard Kunstler has already discussed the fate of suburbia in far, far greater detail than I ever could. The Geography of Nowhere is a whole, book-length treatment of the subject, or you could see the documentary, The End of Suburbia. Suffice it to say, suburbia is so thoroughly unsustainable that it doesn’t even warrant any further discussion here.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 7 October 2006 @ 12:18 PM
Yes, I am. Delete my claims, and you may delete any claims with the IP address that I give under the name “Artemis” as well. That is another sock puppet.
Ya got me, Jason.
Comment by harris_student — 7 October 2006 @ 12:20 PM
I disagree when you argue there is no more discussion to be warranted about suburbia. I’ve read Kunstler’s Geography of Nowhere, even though I have not seen his documentary. He bases his argument almost entirely on its automobile dependence and Peak Oil. Sure, the automobile will not survive Peak Oil, but I am able to get around my suburb just fine with walking and biking, and if horses and buggies return to my neighborhood, I could deal with that as well.
What I think is funny is that when we talk about urban sustainability, our talk is about density, yet we overlook that part of the equation with suburbs and think only about car-dependence. I don’t think some parts of suburbia are as car-dependent as Kunstler claims, and there are also many cities (like Indianapolis, where people sometimes have 1 to 2 acre lots in some parts of the city) that are sprawled out as well.
My argument was about density, and whether or not you felt suburbs were too dense to support themselves since they are not as dense as cities and much more spread out than cities. People like David Holmgren (see Retrofitting the Suburbs for Sustainability) argue that they are low-dense enough to do so, and that their sprawling and low-dense nature could be their saving grace despite their car-dependence today, since many of those amenites could be put back into neighborhoods that now people rely on cars to get to. Also see from “Raise the Hammer,” this article, Self-Reliant Suburbs.
I am not saying I agree with them. I just think that, with alternative views to Kunstler’s quite narrow arguments of automobile dependence (he does not provide a rebuttal with much evidence with the food production counter-argument), and your own problems you have had with Holmgren’s arguments, I wanted to see if you felt that suburbs could support themselves without a hinterland. Obviously, with your argument of “thorough unsustainability” you are telling me that they cannot be somewhat self-sufficient or support themselves, and are too dense. I’m working on filling in the blanks and seeing how people can say one thing to work on others–my autism makes this a lifelong project.
Of course, since I’m Taylor, you can ban me right now and not respond to this–that’s your choice. If you do so, ban the IP address “Palatia” used in the “Brief Summary of Animism” post, since that was my sock puppet as well. Just like you feel you have to respond to people in order to keep them aware of your opinions on future possibilities, I feel I have to post to your ideas so I can see what you would say on various topics. Of course, due to my autism, I often misunderstand you, and thus fall into nervous breakdowns and blowouts of comments. You can ban me from this IP address and the Palatia address as that is at my grandmother’s house and I’m going to be going there for a few days. I want to make sure I’m banned before I go.
Comment by Taylor — 7 October 2006 @ 6:20 PM
Finally, what is your definition of a suburb? Is a suburb a spread-out town or city, or a city surrounded by a larger city?
In that light, what would you call towns larger than 5000 in the countryside? Cities? Towns? Small cities? What abut a city of 5,00 to 100,000, like Bloomington, Indiana which has 70,000 or Ann Arbor, Michigan, which has 100,000, or Hudson, Wisconsin, which as 11,000 people? Are those cities or small cities? Of course, small is subjective since cities that size would be big cities in ancient times, after all, so I would go with the term city. But I guess this is semantics–since with that logic, a suburb should be a city since most suburbs are more than 5000, and even if they aren’t, they are still surrounded by cities. The word “town” seems to be quite confusing when we talk about history or archaeology, since a town can mean a city, archaeologically speaking, and is not considered a village or hamlet and sometimes a village is considered to be more than 5000 (my town of 33000 is sometimes called a village even though it is a suburb, or a “city.”)
Just some food for thought. I hope I’ll be true to my word and this is my last comment here before I’m kicked off this computer and Palatia’s.
Comment by Taylor — 7 October 2006 @ 6:46 PM
If we remove the automobile from the suburb, what we have left is no longer in any recognizable sense suburbia. The structure of the suburb is not a functioning community: it is an outgrowth of the city. It is a place where city workers live, but not where they work.
But, let’s consider the possibility of a transformation, starting from current suburbia, to something else, like a village. Could it be done without massive die-off?
First of all, as already mentioned, we’re beginning with the assumption of massive change. What will emerge will be nothing like the suburbs we know today, so already we’re accepting as a given that suburbs cannot survive in any recognizable form. That’s a significant starting point, since we’re basically saying from the start that the only way to make suburbs sustainable is to make them no longer suburbs. So that rather answers the question of suburban sustainability right there, doesn’t it?
Let’s take the example of Northbrook, Illinois, a wealthy suburb of Chicago. Northbrook is quite homogeneous—nearly 90% white, with another 9% Asian. The median family income is $110,778. This is an incredibly wealthy neighborhood—the kind where simply living in it means well more than just the average 5.6 slaves. The ecological footprint we can assume is massive. The very first thing that Northbrook would need to do to become sustainable would be to suffer a massive cut in quality of life—they will need to transition from some of the wealthiest people of the First World to some of the poorest of the Third. This is unlikely to be a transition they will undergo voluntarily, or without much distress.
Now, if we take the most optimistic possibility, we come up with John Jeavons’ figure of 4,000 sq. ft./person, or 1 acre for every 10 people.1 Let’s assume 10 people constitutes a household. In Northbrook, we see a housing density of 373.3/km2, or about 1.51 houses per acre. So you wouldn’t have enough room for even the most optimistic projections. OK, so let’s say you tear down the schools, the churches, the businesses, everything and turn them all into gardens. Now we’re talking pure population density. 33.6km2, or 361,667,389 sq. ft. to be divided amongst an estimated 34,190: 10,578.16 sq. ft. per person. Plenty of room for Jeavons’ biointensive farming approach!
Now, what does that mean? Jeavons’ estimates assumes that everyone eats a vegan diet,2 which we already know can’t work on this kind of scale. Leaving animal products out of the equation entirely is a major assumption in Jeavons’ work.
Moreover, Jeavons’ techniques rely on edge.4 Two abutting biointensive gardens do not have edge, and it is the edge with forests, forest gardens, and wilderness that are most productive. To be functional, forests must have a minimum area much larger than a biointensive garden. In other words, what makes the biointensive garden so productive is not just its size, but its context: the things that surround it. You can’t simply multiply the per-acre yield times the number of acres, because if you put all of these biointensive fields next to each other, you destroy the very thing that makes them so productive—their edge.
Holmgren has a very optimistic view of how permaculture can help suburbs transition into something else: a horticultural village.
Most importantly, it should be noted that Holmgren isn’t offering permaculture as a way to maintain the status quo, but as a means of transitioning from our current unsustainable state, to essentially horticultural villages, without die-off. He may be overly optimistic even so, but it’s worth trying given the dire consequences of failure, and I have no doubt that as the crisis intensifies, more and more of his solutions will be implemented.
Holmgren makes my point for me. After listing all the ways in which suburbia is less adapted, the only comparison he can find is still the very image of unsustainability: agricultural villages.
So what does this mean for suburbia? Collapse, along with the civilization that created them, that they are dependent on, of course. What does collapse mean? It may mean die-off. That is probably the most likely event, even in the best case scenario. The best hope almost certainly lies in permaculture. Through massive sacrifice and a willingness to depart radically from an established way of life, suburbs have a slim chance of transitioning, with great distress but possibly without massive die-off, from wealthy First World suburbs, to isolated horticultural villages. Even in the best case scenario, though, their proximity to the cities puts them at enormous risk even if they do everything right. In short, while there is a slight chance for some suburbs to become functioning communities (if no longer recognizable as suburbs), it is not a plan that can really be recommended for its high chances of success. Still, retrofitting the suburbs into horticultural villages offers the last, best hope to those unwilling or unable to imagine a life truly beyond civilization.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 8 October 2006 @ 8:38 PM
Hmm. So are you saying that if, in that suburban community Taylor is talking about, if every suburban lot became a biointensive farm, they would not be able to function? Would a biointensive garden die without it’s “edge?”
This is the first time I have heard about biointensive requiring that “edge.” I read your citation with Jeff, and my question is: do you have any other citations, or other people who have proven this? I’m interested because this is the first time I’ve heard about “edge” as a requirement for this form of gardening (I haven’t heard about it on Jeavons’ site).
Comment by yeomanbowman — 14 October 2006 @ 3:04 PM
Part of the “edge” that biointensive gardens depend on for high yields is the edge between their 100 square foot beds. Jeavon’s idea is that you build a 5×20-foot bed and add compost to raise it up about the surrounding paths. The fact that it is convex gives you more surface area than a flat bed, so higher yields. So if you slam all the beds together, you lose that productive edge. I don’t know that it is all that significant–maybe 10-15% more surface.
The other form of edge I can think of is that Jeavons, being honest about inputs, notes that to grow food, you must grow compost. Thus each 100 sf of food garden needs 300-400sf of compost crops for fertility preservation. Most gardeners now just import their fertility from stables or stores, and that’s not sustainable. It would take a very altruistic soul to choose not to mine their soil’s fertility and instead grow 1/4 as much food on land that could, in the short run, yield much more, especially if their kids are hungry. And that’s the dilemma of agriculture.
I’ve enjoyed Jason and Taylor’s exchange about suburbia. In theory the land in suburbia could support maybe half or more of the residents there (just guessing based on lot size). But Jason has cut to the heart of the problem: suburbia without the commute is not suburbia. There is a cultural transformation required, and it’s in a very different direction than the social current of the last century. When Mom and Dad’s jobs disappear and they can’t drive to the office anymore, are they going to create a permaculture paradise, or just freak out? Or at best, try to garden conventionally and find that without fossil-based fertilizers and pesticides they can’t make it work for more than a few seasons. In my cornucopian fantasies I see suburbia returning to the small market gardens it was 40 years ago (where it wasn’t just river valley), but that requires a cultural shift that may be heyond most people. I don’t think suburbanites will just sit in front of their blank TVs and die, but they may well do the wrong things (like try to farm their whole yard) to survive. Again, who’s going to leave 3/4 of his yard fallow or in mulch crops when his kids are hungry? We’ve been working on temperate climate food forests for about 30 years now and are a long ways from making them work well and to deeply understand them. We’ll get there, but maybe not in time to have “Idiots Guide to Forest Gardens” available for former commuters.
Comment by Toby Hemenway — 15 October 2006 @ 12:03 PM
Well, Toby, let’s just thank the fates that you live here in the beautiful Portland area. Nothing like having an expert in one’s own proverbial backyard.
I’ve actually given a lot of thought to the compost crop problem. I know it’s not much of a solution, but I considered the possibility of Portland having grow compost crops on all publicly owned land. Of course, the area would never support the numbers it does now, but it may provide some sort of solution. If this were somehow implemented, then perhaps people would only have to use 1/4 of their land, or maybe even less, to grow compost crops.
Of course, implementing something like this would take more than a small amount of beuracracy, but I could see it being done with fewer people than are now employed by the city (seeing as the personnel required to administer the electrical grid, sewer system and water distribution system would become either unnecessary, or be greatly reduced in number).
Portland proper’s land consists of 10% parks, and while some have suggested that this land could be used to grow food, I would suggest that it be used to grow the requisite compost crops, so that food growing could be spread out in people’s yards, and therefore more difficult for central authorities to control.
I got a job at Portland Parks and Rec so that I could eventually help to further a permaculture-based future for Portland. With an area as progressive and forward thinking as Portland, and as much publicly owned land as it has, I often think it just might be possible. We’ll all see how it goes.
- Chuck
Comment by Chuck — 15 October 2006 @ 2:52 PM
Thank you for your thoughts, Giuli. My suburb is about 10 miles from the city limits, but I understand your thoughts. Thank you.
Comment by suburbguy — 15 October 2006 @ 11:28 PM
I think you meant to post that over here, suburbguy.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 15 October 2006 @ 11:38 PM