The podcast and video list that kept me sane in my office job for the last two years

Podcasts and videos:
http://fic.ic.org/video/ - Visions of Utopia
http://www.ic.org/resources/ - Intentional Communities resources
http://unfccc2.meta-fusion.com/kongresse/dpi64/templ/play.php? id_kongresssession=3859 - Vandana Shiva webinar
http://www.treehugger.com/sustainable-product-design/what-slow- design-and-where-did-it-come.html - "slow design"
http://www.uvm.edu/~uvmpr/?Page=article.php&id=2827 - debate between mckibben and russ roberts
http://www.econsoc.hist.cam.ac.uk/podcasts-saito.html - Japanese Peasant household economics lectures
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=CWt36I8JgVQ - Sustainable mining

Other Resources:
http://www.stockholmresilience.org/ - Stockholm Resilience Center

Advsa "Favorites" Bar:
lynda.com
SALT - seminars about long term thinking
Thingiverse
CBCpodcasts - http://www.cbc.ca/podcasting/
saveourskills.com
Nature's Harmony Farm
Survival Podcast
Self-sufficient gardener
The Independent Entrepreneur - http://www.indybizshow.com/
Stanford University Entrepreneurship Corner podcasts - http://ecorner.stanford.edu/podcasts.html
Agroinnovations
Vegetable Gardening (with mike)
Permaculture Magazine
Mother Earth News
Permaculture Media Blog
Permaculture Planet
Prepper Podcast Facebook
E.F. Schumaker Society lectures
Kauffman Foundation - Infectious talk
Growing Local Economies - Resources - http://growinglocaleconomies.com/resources
Podcasts - LSE
Future Primitive Podcasts interviews with authors, visionaries, and innovators - http://www.futureprimitive.org/
Columbia Podcasts Archives - http://ccnmtl.columbia.edu/podcasting/podcasts/
Edible Radio - http://www.ediblecommunities.com/radio/
Sustainable World Radio - http://www.sustainableworldradio.com/
DIY Scholar - International Relations
DIY Scholar - http://diyscholar.wordpress.com/
Equal Time Radio - http://www.equaltimeradio.com/
Miller Center of Public Affairs rss - http://feeds.feedburner.com/millercenter
TED
The History Network podcasts - http://thehistorynetwork.org/
UC Berkeley webcasts - http://webcast.berkeley.edu/
Radio Open Source - http://www.radioopensource.org/
Small Farmer's Journal - http://smallfarmersjournal.com/
The Urban Farming Guys - http://theurbanfarmingguys.com/ Inspiration Farm classes - http://www.inspirationfarm.com/newif/Classes.html
Organic Gardening Magazine - http://www.organicgardening.com/
MIT OpenCourseWare - History - http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/history/
Wriggly Wrigglers podcast - http://www.wigglywigglers.co.uk/podcasts/
Ken Druse garden podcast - http://www.kendruse.typepad.com/
A Way to Garden - Margaret Roach - http://awaytogarden.com/
Princeton University WebMedia - http://hulk03.princeton.edu:8080/WebMedia/lectures/
Open Culture - www.openculture.com
The Self-Sufficient Homestead - http://sshomestead.com/
NewHouse Farm (Dick and James Strawbridge, BBC show) - http://newhousefarm.tv/
Root Simple - http://www.rootsimple.com/
Kunstlercast
12 dozen places to Educate Yourself Online for Free - http://www.marcandangel.com/2010/11/15/12-dozen-places-to-self- educate-yourself-online/
Make Magazine blog - http://blog.makezine.com/
Make videos and podcasts - http://blog.makezine.com/video/
Permaculture Activist magazine
The Long Now Foundation
Whole Earth Catalog - http://www.wholeearth.com/index.php
Chelsea Green - http://www.chelseagreen.com/
Chelsea Green Podcasts - http://www.chelseagreen.com/radio/
FORA.tv - http://fora.tv/
Global Guerrillas
Ushahidi - open source information platform - http://ushahidi.com/
Fast Company
Backwoods Home Magazine
Radio Free Dylan
Santa Fe Institute videos
12 podcasts for the creative class - Fast Company
Inc.
MIT Opencourseware
Introduction to Electronics - http://www.makingthings.com/teleo/products/documentation/teleo_user_guide/electronics.html
www.makingthings.com
http://www.sustainableworldradio.com/Permaculture_Podcasts_7941.html
Acres USA
Farm Dreams
The Simple Good Life Network
Geek Farm Life
French Organic Gardening Magazine - http://www.terrevivante.org/

Institute For The Future's "Resilience Principles"

Flexibility
Be ready to change your plans when they’re not working the way you expected; don’t count on things remaining stable.

Diversity
Not relying on a single kind of solution means not suffering from a single point of failure.

Decentralization
Centralized systems look strong, but when they fail, they fail catastrophically.

Collaboration
We’re all in this together. Take advantage of collaborative technologies, especially those offering shared communication and information.

Transparency
Don’t hide your systems; transparency makes it easier to figure out where a problem may lie. Share your plans and preparations, and listen when people point out flaws.

Foresight
You can’t predict the future, but you can hear its footsteps approaching. Anticipate and prepare.

Graceful Failure
Failure happens, so make sure that a failure state won’t make things worse than they are already.

More from IFTF's Food Map 2020:

In a world of rapid change, resilience is the key to products, processes, and organizations that have staying power. It’s the capacity of a system to withstand unexpected shocks, to repair itself when necessary, and to thrive when conditions are right. The underlying assumption of resilience is that, yes, failure happens, but it is possible to design systems that can quickly bounce back from failure.

It often requires embracing behaviors and principles that run counter to expectations, or that
are seen as contrary to “what works” — even when “what works” is prone to catastrophic failure when problems arise. Established leaders and institutions may even find aspects of resilience threatening. For many organizations, the challenge of resilience will emerge in the recognition that efficiency, particularly production efficiency, can be problematic — or, rather, what we do to increase production efficiency can run counter to the demands of resilience.

And as it pertains to agriculture:

resilience is the capacity of our food networks, relationships, technologies, and industries to continue to provide nutrition to the world during radical, even unprecedented, environmental and economic disruptions. In this century, our ability to foster resilient food systems will be essential, not only to our organizations, but to human survival. The principles of resilience thus provide the rules of thumb for anyone who is responsible for designing or managing activities within the the global food web."

Different types of capital assets

Physical capital - or just 'capital' refers to any already-manufactured asset that is applied in production, such as machinery, buildings, or vehicles. In economic theory, physical capital is one of the three primary factors of production, also known as inputs in the production function. The others are natural resources (including land), and labor — the stock of competences embodied in the labor force. "Physical" is used to distinguish physical capital from human capital (a result of investment in the human agent)) and financial capital. Often used to mean fixed capital.

Fixed capital - not used up in the creation of a thing. Karl Marx emphasizes that it is really purely relative, i.e. refers only to the comparative rotation speeds (turnover time) of different types of capital assets. Fixed capital also "circulates", except that the circulation time is much longer, because a fixed asset may be held for 5, 10 or 20 years before it has yielded its value and is discarded for its salvage value.

Circulating capital - short-lived items that are used in production and used up in the process of creating other goods or services; includes raw materials, intermediate goods, inventories, ancillary operating expenses and (working capital). Contrasted with fixed capital.

Liquid capital - or fluid capital, a readily convertible asset, such as money or other bearer economic instruments, as opposed to a long term asset like real estate

Financial capital - money (the most fluid capital)

Human capital - the stock of competencies, knowledge and personality attributes embodied in the ability to perform labor so as to produce economic value. It is the attributes gained by a worker through education and experience. [1] Many early economic theories refer to it simply as workforce, one of three factors of production, and consider it to be a fungible resource -- homogeneous and easily interchangeable. "...up to a point, consumption is investment in personal productive capacity." ~W. Lewis

Marie Mies on capital accumulation and unpaid subsistence labor

The issue was: what does housework mean in capitalism? Why isn't this work seen as work? Why isn't it paid? Why is it non-paid labor? We recognized that in capitalism this work can't be paid, because if it were, the accumulation model would collapse...

And then we discovered...that the small farmers' work also has something to do with housework and both have something to do with the work in the colonies. Then this concept emerged, as all three of us were in the Third World for extended periods. I was in India for many years, my two friends were in Latin America, and so we realized: if entire countries hadn't been exploited as colonies for long periods of time, then there wouldn't be any capitalism. And if they were treated equally today, all of the work in the "colonies" - I still call them "colonies" - well, then there wouldn't be much to accumulate. And that's why we call all of these relations colonial relations. The man-woman relationship is colonial, the relationship between the small farmer and industry is also colonial, and naturally, the colonial relationships between metropolises and colonies are definitely colonial.

...with these activities - even if they take place at a very low level - people rediscover their sovereignty, their own authority to produce their lives, as we call it. That is no shortcoming, it is something very positive to discover, that we are entirely capable of collectively producing and organizing our lives together, with others. Naturally, you also need money. I don't want to deny that at all, but exclusively working for money is not the best thing - that is only one side of it. The other is that subsistence production, or subsistence orientation, satisfies needs in a much more comprehensive way than purchased products ever could.

- from P2P

The economics of neosubsistence vs. traditional subsistence

Traditional subsistence farming communities that are not connected to an industrial economy nearly always become poor and destitute, as a result of pressure on the land from a growing population. At its worst, this leads to starvation when once-adequate household farms are subdivided over and over again for generations of heirs until the acreage of individual farms becomes insufficient for subsistence. Long before the worst, the diminished farms fail to provide a significant disposable income, and people, though well-fed, are poor for lack of manufactured goods. Where there is an industrial town or city nearby, the excess population can migrate as industrial labor.

I tend to think that agricultural development policies often function to force people off land into towns as cheap labor for industry. On reflection, it is possible that in the absence of an industrial economy, rural standards of living would decrease indefinitely toward a state of degradation. If population remained static, this would not need to be the case, and before high mortality rates were arrested by modern medicine and sanitation, perhaps there was more stability in peasant farming communities, though De____'s accounts of starving masses of peasants in old Europe suggests otherwise.

The problem with industrializing an economy as a solution, of course, is that most industrial activity currently practiced is unsustainable, predicated on endless growth, and so if growth stalls, or turns negative, the urban population faces unemployment or depressed wages. As we are likely reaching unsurmountable supply constraints to industrialization (exhausted oil supplies, etc.), I believe there is a real risk of indefinitely-stalled growth. Where does the excess population go when the cities fail to absorb them? Even if population levels stabilize, exhausted supplies (and political instability) may make our current model of industrialization--specialized mass production coupled with lengthy supply lines--untenable.

In economic terms, industrialization creates externalities in the form of pollution and depleted common-pool resources (natural capital).

How does neosubsistence differ?

Marcin defines neosubsistence as such:

"Neosubsistence: The combination of advanced material and information technologies introduces a new economic option that we call neosubsistence. This is modern day means to livelihood where wise use of advanced technology and ready access to information allows one to spend a small amount of time in self-sufficiency production. This leads to a high quality of life where higher skill provides more resources in-house, reduces the need to 'work to make a living,' and opens up time for other pursuits. It is a route to promoting a bioregional economy, which relies more on its own resources rather than uncontrollable global market forces. This promotes accountability and reduces the necessity of war."

Thoughts:

Suburbia was perhaps the first attempt at neosubsistence. I have old pamphlets from the thirties and forties describing food production on quarter and half acre lots, directed toward the early car-owning ex-urbanite. But suburbia not only chose lawns over chickens and orchards, but turned out to have serious externalities: rapid exhaustion of oil supplies, congestion, community fragmentation, pollution. The infrastructure required to sustain the suburban project is a grossly inefficient use of capital which requires a constant inflow of new capital to operate.

In effect, the updated rendering of neosubsistence as offered by Marcin and currently bandied about the DIY community appears in the context of (a) the information age, and (b) the promise of flexible manufacturing at the household or village level. Is it possible that these innovations could re-empower independent, subsistence lifestyles? Birth a new movement of superempowered peasants? If industry can occur at a smaller, more local scale, minus the oil use, the congestion, the pollution, and with a renewed emphasis on community cohesion--could we have our proverbial cake and eat it, too? Can we accumulate the necessary capital to empower farming households, and could we absorb the excess labor on site as it's liberated by the increased productivity of agriculture brought by capitalizion? And, of course, can trade and cooperation be adequately facilitated over distance by the internet?

Some key terms here:

Flexible fabrication
Community capital
Networked communities

Farm productivity (point of clarity)

Sustainable farming has the capacity to be more productive per acre, but will generally be less productive per farmer. Resource (land) productivity goes up while labor productivity goes down.

What's the sense in pursuing any other way of farming when we have so many unemployed? (Duh, increased labor competition = decreased labor wages.) It's asinine. And does sustainable, labor-intensive farming need to be miserable? That's the argument. I would guess no. I'll be developing this more in my series on capital accumulation.

Capital accumulation - a thought experiment 2

Part 1
Part 3

The traditional categories of economic inputs are labor and capital. To understand how capital accumulates we need to look at labor. Both begin with energy. Energy on earth comes from the sun, in the form of heat and light. Heat and light make plants grow, which feed animals, all of which feed and clothe humans.

Labor is our conversion of the sun's energy into work--e.g., we consume calories which plants and animals have made using sunlight, and then we use those calories as fuel to move about and do things. I prefer to think of capital as the accumulated mass of stuff that is the result of work. How this stuff is owned and distributed is one thing, but at its most basic level, capital is stored energy. Thus, we might think of labor as flow, and capital as stock. About stocks and flows, wiki says:

A stock in this broader sense is some entity that is accumulated over time by inflows and/or depleted by outflows. Stocks can only be changed via flows. Mathematically a stock can be seen as an accumulation or integration of flows over time - with outflows subtracting from the stock. Stocks typically have a certain value at each moment of time - e.g. the number of population at a certain moment.

A flow (or "rate") changes a stock over time. Usually we can clearly distinguish inflows (adding to the stock) and outflows (subtracting from the stock). Flows typically are measured over a certain interval of time - e.g., the number of births over a day or month.

In fact, to return to and amend the first paragraph, labor and capital not only both begin with the energy of the sun (flow), they also begin with the materials of the earth (stock). Plants use the energy of the sun to do work to transform the gases and minerals--the earth's raw materials--into stems, leaves, flowers, and seeds, and so on. The sun's energy is actually a stock in that there is a finite amount of gas, and as it burns, outflows from the sun become inflows to earth. This transferrence of energy gives plants the ability to do work, and their work gradually increases the natural capital of the ecosystems of the earth, which is the combination of earth's stock and the inflows of energy from the sun.

Natural capital is the earth's accumulated capital of stored energy, our inheritance. This includes all the wealth of diverse ecosystems, the water catchment of forests, and so on, as well as fossil fuels which are forests long gone. It's worth noting that fossil fuels have taken billions of years to accumulate (slow inflow) and are being depleted at a remarkably rapid rate (fast outflow). There are, in fact, only inflows and outflows in a given system at a given scale - the wider you look, the more this looks like circulation within stock. So, an outflow here is an inflow there. We all know what happens with the food we eat, and the rest comes out as heat energy.

Of course, there is a difference between individual capital accumulation and collective capital accumulation. Lifeforms do work, they create surplus, that surplus may increase their odds of survival either directly or indirectly, it may encourage other lifeforms to flourish that relate either as symbiotes or parasites. It likely creates more niches, which invites greater diversity and complexity, all of which allows for more and more life in an ecosystem. If life is wealth, this is how it's built.

his is all to demonstrate (1) that capital accumulation has a counterpart in nature, and (2) what it looks like and how it works in nature.

And remember, the role of labor in accumulating is that labor brings inflows. It is not the only inflow, and whether or not it results in accumulated capital for an individual or household depends on a number of things in addition to labor, but a consideration of the notion of accumulated capital in its broadest sense is a good place to start. Next let's look at labor.

Capital accumulation - a thought experiment 1

Part 2
Part 3

According to Doreen Warriner, a primary problem with subsistence farming economies is inadequate capital accumulation. Capital accumulation "refers to the gathering or amassing of objects of value; the increase in wealth through concentration; or the creation of wealth."

I can only understand her assertion to mean that the surplus of labor in subsistence farming households or communities doesn't amount to enough to form a viable buffer against disaster.

How much capital do you need?

Whether or not a buffer is adequate depends entirely on the context. In a non-competitive primitive society, having one full grain silo mortared into a canyon wall might be enough to get through a bad year. Where there is an ongoing risk of raids by a competing society, an adequate buffer might include a class of warriors supported largely by the women's agricultural efforts.

In contemporary society, it's hard to know what's necessary, and competitors tend to keep pace with each other just to feel secure. During the cold war, two competitive societies poured tremendous amounts of surplus capital into developing expensive nuclear arsenals and accumulating arms just in case. In the Soviet Union, they managed to extract this surplus of labor from a relatively impoverished society. In a hypothetical permanent colony on Mars, basic subsistence would involve a lot more than just growing food and making clothes, so there would presumably need to be very efficient mechanisms in place for taking care of these things so ample additional time could be freed up for troubleshooting life support systems. For the colonists, your surplus doesn't even begin until a lot more in the way of basic needs have been met--your subsistence is dependent on a lot more accumulated capital than a hunter-gatherer, and your surplus labor goes towards ensuring the continuity of this essential capital before you can begin to accumulate a buffer. (Note: this is just an exaggerated version of the difference between hunter-gatherer and agricultural societies--which I delve into more in part 3--in that farmers need more capital than h-gs because the surrounding environment cannot provide for their needs by itself...in other words, they can rely less on ecosystem services.)

A lot of our notions around self-sufficiency and idyllic, rural hamlet economies in the developed world arise in the context of massive capital accumulation occurring all around us. There is no village or inner city in the U.S. that is not impacted by the vast amount of capital accumulation in our society as a whole. For example, a family homesteading in rural Eastern Washington has a truck, a grain mill, a wood stove, etc. Where do these objects come from? They probably didn't make them. Even if they found the grain mill second-hand and fixed it up, it's existence in the pawn shop is still a result of massive capital accumulation in the surrounding economy. It is a relic of that economy and it's value (in this case: cheap) arises in that context--there are enough floating around out there (high supply), and not that many people want them right now (low demand).

As one example of differences in value relative to collective capital accumulation, my neighbor consistently puts old wood out on the curb with a FREE sign on it. Sometimes it sits there for days. I can promise you that wood would be gone in an instant in the highlands of Vietnam, or anyplace in the world where people routinely walk several miles to gather firewood, which are the same places that are poor, and without mass amounts of capital accumulation leaching out of the cities into the countryside. So, in America and all the developed world we are awash in material goods, which makes it easy to take for granted the value of capital accumulation...which we harvest, in the homesteading community, more or less as scavengers. (Quick note: there is nothing wrong with this; it is a very reasonable and ethical choice to make, but it is not a viable model for a sustainable economic structure, and ultimately that's what I'll be exploring here.)

That said, it is also abundantly clear that the distribution patterns of capital accumulation in our society have resulted in gross inequalities that are not the product of differences in how hard people work. Moreover, this has almost always been the case when agriculture yields a surplus. It's never been the productive farmers that call the shots, but those that live off the surplus of their productivity, e.g. the aristocrats taxing heavily for "protection" services. Jeff Vail's Rhizome Theory demonstrates how dependency which begins with the desire to pool risk by coordinating capital accumulation results in (a) heirarchy, which (b) drives unsustainable competition between social actors that (c) results in resource destruction and oppression.

But of course capital accumulation is necessary for a secure society and decent standard of living! So the big question is: how do we accumulate capital without the associated inequalities and deprivations? Here begins the thought experiment.

Community Alliance for Global Justice's critique of AGRA

Four Categories of Problems with AGRA

Political
• uses tax-exempt foundation money to act without accountability
• uses influence to monopolize discussions of development and agriculture
• promotes solutions decided upon undemocratically, by people whose authority has not been conferred by the populace and whose frame of reference is the Global North
• frames the problem as African production, rather than global distribution

Social
• privileges large-scale farmers/landholders
• encourages the purchase of inputs from foreign companies, leading to indebtedness
• intensifies reliance on volatile global economy
• does not address structural and social inequalities
• has the potential to exacerbate women’s poverty in integrated cash economies

Environmental
• encourages higher intensity of cultivation and monocropping, which decreases biodiversity and undermines indigenous crops
• potential for GE crops to be introduced and contaminate surrounding crops
• is uncritical of the first Green Revolution and does not acknowledge that its priniciples were introduced in some countries in Africa, and failed

Ethical
• privileges/asserts Western knowledge systems
• limits self-determination among farmers in Africa
• receives funding from foundations whose wealth is rooted in the maintenance of unequal global distribution
• promotes a racist model of development in which African producers are targets of Western conceptions of linear “progress”
• devalues the systems and knowledge of local peoples and precludes reciprocity and mutuality in exchanging ideas

One.org's Agricultural Policy - Critical Analysis

I am always excited about prospects for linking organic gardening with sustainable development, and appreciate any connection we can make between our own struggles for a sustainable local food system with the subsistence struggles of farmers in developing countries.

That said, I am fairly convinced at this point that One.org is not acting in the best interests of sustainability or resilience--economic or ecological--for Africa or for ourselves. Their long-term plans for developing Africa's agriculture seem by all accounts to be focusing on "green revolution" style improvements, including GM corn crops, subsidized inputs of patented seeds and chemical fertilizers, and partnerships with Agribusiness giants Monsanto and Cargill. There are also indications that the organization supports structural adjustment policies that force developing nations to remove tariffs and open up their ag markets to the fluctuations of global commodity prices.

I took some time to research this before writing, as I wanted to make sure it wasn't just hearsay. The fact is, One.org and their grantmakers and board members -- including AGRA (Gates Foundation) and the U.S. government's "Feed the Future" initiative -- are very guarded about the details of what they are actually doing on the ground in Africa. I did manage to find some good indications that the worst is true. Below are some excerpts and links to the most legitimate of the articles and documents I could find.

Different Shade of Green in Africa

Time article that covers the competing perspectives on sustainable agricultural development, with AGRA (Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation→One.org) falling solidly on the Big Ag/GMO/chemical inputs side of the argument rather than the ecological agriculture side; also includes a disturbing indication of the ongoing costs that small farmers will incur under the new system.

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation Agricultural Development Strategy Overview:

"$39.1 million - Water Efficient Maize for Africa (WEMA) - African Agricultural Technology Foundation (AATF) - This project seeks to develop drought-tolerant maize varieties to benefit smallholder African farmers in five countries. A portion of this grant funds research that uses transgenic approaches. (Monsanto is a subcontractor to AATF on this grant.)"

One.org policy brief:

"The private sector is a key component needed to drive growth, create markets, and improve food security by creating employment opportunities and reducing barriers to agricultural trade. The Asian and Latin American "Green Revolutions" that increased incomes and access to food for an estimated 1 billion people was underpinned by public and private investments in research, irrigation, infrastructure and extension. Therefore, investments are needed across the African agriculture sector for improving suitable seeds and fertilizers, farming practices, storage, processing, distribution and marketing…"

Huffington Post article:

"If you had any doubts about where the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is really placing its bets, AGRA Watch's recent announcement of the Foundation's investment of $23.1 million in 500,000 shares of Monsanto stock should put them to rest. Genetic engineering: full speed ahead."

Guardian article:

“South Africa-based watchdog the African Centre for Biosafety then found that the foundation was teaming up with Cargill in a $10m project to "develop the soya value chain" in Mozambique and elsewhere. Who knows what this corporate-speak really means, but in all probability it heralds the big time introduction of GM soya in southern Africa."

Monsanto blog post supporting One.org: 'Nuff said.

Statement by Dr. Hans Herrens, chief editor of the most comprehensive survey of agricultural development strategies to date, the 600 page “Agriculture at a Crossroads” report by the International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development (IAASTD):

"More revealing than what is said (or not said) in Feed the Future, is how it is interpreted. According to USAID, FTF will “build on breakthroughs in science and technology,” to be "delivered to" small-scale agricultural producers - which seems to belie the words about participation and recognizing local and Indigenous knowledge that appeared in the Summary document (the Country Investment Plans). There is no mention of agroecological farming or ecological agriculture and neither any of the IAASTD, the most comprehensive assessment of agricultural knowledge, science and technology published in the past couple of years, or actually anytime. There is no mention of addressing inequity in trade arrangements or within or between countries. Rather, the emphasis is on "agriculture-led growth" through "trade and other mechanisms," "seeking reductions in government controls on commodity prices,” and “protecting intellectual property.” The focus throughout is rather vaguely on building partnerships with everyone -- with the World Bank, IFAD, private sector, NGOs, etc. Special emphasis is given to investing in the WB's Global Ag & Food Security Program (GAFSP) which allows only minimal and carefully controlled inputs from civil society and which many see as the WB's way of funneling more investments towards transgenic, nanotech & other converging technologies."

And for your perusal, if you're as much an Ag nerd as I am: International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development (IAASTD):

The objective of the International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development (IAASTD) was to assess the impacts of past, present and future agricultural knowledge, science and technology on the
• reduction of hunger and poverty,
• improvement of rural livelihoods and human health, and
• equitable, socially, environmentally and economically sustainable development.

The place where Greg & Annie got married!

There's No Place Like Here: Communal Living with Nikki Silva

HLS Building Resilient Communities and other articles

Article by Longstaff et al: Building Resilient Communities: A Preliminary Framework for Assessment.

Economies of Scale Suppress Risk Resilience.

The food system is one context where this hypothesis might be tested. Over the last half century increasing scale and specialization of production and processing have significantly reduced the consumers cost of food as a proportion of overall income. The source of this savings has, however, also substantially reduced the number, diversity, and distribution of producers and processors. This narrows the ability of the food system to bounce back from a catastrophic event. If this is true for the food system might it also be the case for other supply chains?

Because the supply chain originates far away and draws on unknown sources there is an impression of complexity. And across these attenuated supply chains there are complex characteristics: lots of filters, need for pattern recognition, and some aspects of adaptive response.

But is the food system “complex” as defined by the Cynefin framework? The crowd sourcing of many more independent producers and processors has been reduced and standardized. Open markets have been replaced with much more predictable production contracts. The entire system has been reengineered and squeezed to maximize every penny-per-pound. In some ways, with fewer participants and fewer relationships the food system is actually much simpler than four or five decades ago.

Resilient Character.

And, from Resiliance Alliance:

The resilience of social-ecological systems depends largely on underlying, slowly changing variables such as climate, land use, nutrient stocks, human values and policies. Resilience can be degraded by a large variety of factors including:
1. loss of biodiversity
2. toxic pollution
3. inflexible, closed institutions
4. perverse subsidies that encourage unsustainable use of resources
5. a focus on production and increased efficiences that leads to a loss of redundancy

HLSwatch "Resilience: 5 Principles of Good Practice"

Article here.

For an individual or community or system, an increasing body of evidence suggests resilience is more likely when there is:

Awareness: Observe and engage the full context,
Connectedness: Recognize and engage our full range of relationships and dependencies,
Realism: Differentiate between cause and effect, capacity and capability, novelty and continuity.
Agility: Expect change in context and relationships, remain creatively open to change, and actively embrace change.
Flexibility: Expand the “basin of attraction” where and how turbulence can occur without threatening our fundamental identity.

Jamais Cascio's Principles of Resilience

This is framed in the context of disaster preparedness, but of course has broader application. Article here.

Graphic by Mario Vellandi

Diversity: Not relying on a single kind of solution means not suffering from a single point of failure. (Prepare for different kinds of problems -- needing to escape the house, needing to stay in the house, dealing with no water, etc.)

Redundancy: Backup, backup, backup. Never leave yourself with just one path of escape or rescue. (Make sure you have multiple copies of critical documents and extra amounts of key medications.)

Decentralization: Again with the single point of failure problem. Centralized systems look strong, but when they fail, they fail catastrophically. (Don't store your emergency supplies in one location -- spread them out.)

Collaboration: We're all in this together. (Take advantage of -- and learn to use -- collaborative technologies, especially those offering shared communication and information.)

Transparency: Don't hide your systems -- transparency makes it easier to figure out where a problem may lie. (Make sure key shut-off switches -- for gas, especially -- are readily identified.)

Openness: Many eyes make all bugs shallow. Share your plans and preparations, and listen when people point out flaws. (You're safer in an emergency when everyone is safer.)

Fail Gracefully: Failure happens, so make sure that failure states don't make things worse than they are already. (Think about what'll happen when disaster strikes -- what will fall, shatter, burst into flames, and what can you do now to prevent it?)

Flexibility: Be ready to change your plans when they're not working the way you expect. Don't get locked in to a particular approach. (Pay attention to what's happening around you, and don't expect things to remain stable.)

Foresight: You can't predict the future, but you can hear its footsteps approaching. Think and prepare. (Make sure you have your emergency kit ready before the emergency hits.)

10 Principles for a Resilient Culture [WORKING DRAFT]

1. Secure Your Sustenance. Never give up your direct link to sustenance resources including land, raw materials, tools, and skills. This need not apply to every individual, but should apply to every household and at the very least to a village-scale unit of households for whom mutual loyalty and interdependence runs deep. Jeff Vail's minimal self-sufficiency. Emphasize livelihood over career.

2. Cultivate Interdependency and Relationship. Do favors for neighbors, develop reciprocal relationships and trade. Have fun together. Hold fairs and festivals. Develop a skill set that has value to your neighbors. Offer it. Jack of All Trades, Master of One.

3. Invest Much, Spend Little. Protect your endowments. Always have enough surplus of basic needs on hand to outlast a bad year, or three. Treat your non-renewable resources as capital and never deplete the principle. Always think in terms of long-term payoff.

4. Know No Waste. Socially: everyone is capable of doing something useful. Ensure everybody has a role that is meaningful, takes effort, and provides something of value. No tokenism. Materially: eliminate your waste stream. There is no waste in nature. The ideal is that everything either biodegrades or can be limitlessly recycled; energy must be renewable.

5. Replace Standard of Living with Quality of Life. Create meaningful rituals, hold recurring events, eat well, and have fun together.

6. Practice Democracy. Practice making decisions together to manage common resources. Honor everybody's voice and opinion. Avoid consistently alienating anyone. Feuds are real threats when families have ongoing multigenerational relationships with each other. Get comfortable with argument and hashing things out till you reach a decision.

7. Set Clear Boundaries. Have clear notions around ownership and legal entitlements. Make sure people know their individual and collective rights.

8. Embrace Complexity. Some things are not simple. Be attentive to externalized costs. Do not judge activities, tools, or investments by measures which reduce efficiency or productivity to simple axes.

9. Value Diversity. Not just in ecosystems but in economies and social environments. Monocultures and homogeneity in general generally yield gains for the few at the expense of the many, and short-term "efficiencies" at the expense of long-term systemic resilience. Respect your neighbor and the choices your neighbor makes, so long as they do not actively impede your own ability to take care of yourself or your family.

10. Self-sacrifice. The acceptance of the possibility of death releases unimaginable power. One need not be willing to kill to protect themselves, their family, their neighbors, the innocent, or the good, but one must be willing to die to do so.

Preparing our Communities for Uncertain Times. Updating "community development." The problem with the idea of development. Redefine or toss. In it's place: ? Proposition: this is where we should have been going all along and certainly where we should be heading now. Responding the Jeff Vail's "One institution that I do wish to explore here is the notion of anthropological self-awareness. It is important that the every participant node in rhizome has an understanding of the theoretical foundation of rhizome, and of the general workings of anthropological systems in general. Without this knowledge, it is very likely that participants will fail to realize the pitfalls of dependency, resulting in a quick slide back to hierarchy... Additionally, it is important to recognize the cultural programming that hierarchal systems provide, and to consciously reject and replace parts of this with a myth, taboo, and morality that supports rhizome and discourages hierarchy. Rules are inherently hierarchal—they must be enforced by a superior power, and are not appropriate for governing rhizome. However, normative standards—social norms, taboos, and values—are effective means of coordinating rhizome without resorting to hierarchy. For example, within the context of anthropological self-awareness, it would be considered “wrong” or “taboo” to have slaves, to be a lord of the manor, or to “own” more property than you can reasonably put to sustainable use. This wouldn’t be encoded in a set of laws and enforced by a ruling police power, but rather exist as the normative standard, compliance with which is the prerequisite for full participation in the network."

Jeff Vail

Required reading on "Rhizomes"

From the first article:

"...it is remarkable that such a simple concept underlies the necessity of growth: within hierarchy, surplus production equates to power, requiring competing entities across all scales to produce ever more surplus—to grow—in order to compete, survive, and prosper."

"Growth cannot continue infinitely on a finite planet. This must seem obvious to many people, but I emphasize the point because we tend to overlook or ignore its significance: the basis of our civilization is fundamentally unsustainable. Our civilization seems to have a knack for pushing the envelope, for finding stop-gap measures to push growth beyond a sustainable level. This is also problematic because the further we are able to inflate this bubble beyond a level that is sustainable indefinitely, the farther we must ultimately fall to return to a sustainable world. This is Civilization’s sunk cost: there is serious doubt that our planet can sustain 6+ billion people over the long term, but by drawing a line in the sand, that 'a solution that results in the death of millions or billions to return to a sustainable level' is fundamentally impermissible, we merely increase the number that must ultimately die off."

"Can global governance lead to an agreement to abate or otherwise manage growth effectively? It's theoretically possible, but I see it about as likely as solving war by getting everyone to agree to not fight. Plus, as the constitutional validity and effective power of the Nation-State declines, even if Nation-States manage to all agree to abate growth, they will fail because they are engaged in a very real peer-polity competition with non-state groups that will only use this competitive weakness as a means to establish a more dominant position--and continue growth."

"Exhaustion of energy reserves or environmental capacity could hobble the ability of civilization to grow for long periods of time--perhaps even on a geological time scale--but we have no way of knowing for sure that a post-crash civilization will not be just as ragingly growth-oriented as today's civilization, replete with the same or greater negative effects on the environment and the human spirit."

Unpacking "Value"

I'm on a mission to understand the idea of value. It's important to know what we're talking about when we say something is valuable. A start:

Two "value"s - a concept of worth vs. beliefs about how things should be. They are related in that values as beliefs define what a person or culture thinks is worth defending or promulgating.

Moral vs. natural goods - both can have value.

"In Ecological Economics value theory is separated into two types: Donor-type value and receiver-type value. Ecological economists tend to believe that 'real wealth' needs a donor-determined value as a measure of what things were needed to make an item or generate a service. (H.T. Odum 1996). An example of receiver-type value is 'market value', or 'willingness to pay', the principal method of accounting used in neo-classical economics. In contrast both, Marx's Labour Theory of Value and the 'Emergy' concept are conceived as donor-type value. Emergy theorists believe that this conception of value has relevance to all of philosophy, economics, sociology and psychology as well as Environmental Science."

Instrumental vs. instrinsic value - "An instrumental value is worth having as a means towards getting something else that is good (e.g., a radio is instrumentally good in order to hear music). An intrinsically valuable thing is worth having for itself, not as a means to something else. It is giving value intrinsic and extrinsic properties." Not mutually exclusive. John Dewey rejected the idea of intrinsic value.

"Marx distinguished between the "value in use" (use-value, what a commodity provides to its buyer), "value" (the socially-necessary labour time it embodies), and "exchange value" (how much labor-time the sale of the commodity can claim, Smith's "labor commanded" value)"

In economics, the worth of a good or service as determined by the market. Value in use vs. value in exchange. The value in exchange is relative to other goods.

Labor Theory of Value - "In classical economics, the value of an object or condition is the amount of discomfort/labor saved through the consumption or use of an object or condition."

"The value of a thing in any given time and place", according to Henry George, "is the largest amount of exertion that anyone will render in exchange for it. But as men always seek to gratify their desires with the least exertion this is the lowest amount for which a similar thing can otherwise be obtained."

"In 1860 John Ruskin published a critique of the economic concept of value from a moral point of view. He entitled the volume Unto This Last, and his central point was this: "It is impossible to conclude, of any given mass of acquired wealth, merely by the fact of its existence, whether it signifies good or evil to the nation in the midst of which it exists. Its real value depends on the moral sign attached to it, just as strictly as that of a mathematical quantity depends on the algebraic sign attached to it. Any given accumulation of commercial wealth may be indicative, on the one hand, of faithful industries, progressive energies, and productive ingenuities: or, on the other, it may be indicative of mortal luxury, merciless tyranny, ruinous chicanery." Gandhi was greatly inspired by Ruskin's book and published a paraphrase of it in 1908."

"Value in the most basic sense can be referred to as "Real Value" or "Actual Value." This is the measure of worth that is based purely on the utility derived from the consumption of a product or service. Utility derived value allows products or services to be measured on outcome instead of demand or supply theories that have the inherent ability to be manipulated. Illustration: The real value of a book sold to a student who pays $50.00 at the cash register for the text and who earns no additional income from reading the book is essentially zero. However; the real value of the same text purchased in a thrift shop at a price of $0.25 and provides the reader with an insight that allows him or her to earn $100,000.00 in additional income is $100,000.00 or the extended lifetime value earned by the consumer. This is value calculated by actual measurements of ROI instead of production input and or demand vs. supply. No single unit has a fixed value. Value is intrinsically related to the worth derived by the consumer. [Burke(2005)]."

Vandana Shiva's Sydney Peace Prize speech

Vandana Shiva : Sydney Peace Prize Talk from WisdomKeepers Productions on Vimeo.

The Value of Semi-Subsistence Farms according to the European Network for Rural Development

ENRD seminar on the undervalued public goods provided by semi-subsistence farms. These include biodiversity, cultural richness and stability, and social welfare.

Solar circle

From WSU Solar Energy Center. PDF here.