First application of the peasant economics research

In Survival Podcast Episode-802- Permaculture Misconception vs. Reality (@29m45), Jack Spirko talks about reducing the size of the average farm so the average farmer can make a living on 40-80 acres like they used to. Currently, farmers with a thousand acres might earn $25,000 including subsidies. Permaculture would mean growing 4 acres of premium corn and lots of other things, as well, and earning a decent living doing it. Jack states that the farmer would have to hire people to pick instead of using machinery, which would cost more but be good for the economy and make a more sustainable local economy.

Theory from the research on the economics of peasant farms:

• This will drive food prices up
• which will decrease the purchasing power of wages in other sectors
• but will probably drive wages up in those other sectors due to less competition for jobs
• which may decrease activity in those other sectors
• but either way it will provide more employment on the land
• which will encourage migration out of other sectors and back to agriculture and into the countryside (this would be true in the U.S., now, since rural areas are now so sparsely populated, whereas in the Old World the same dynamic would have checked the initial migration into industrial employment and encouraged people to stay on the land)
• BUT, it's possible we've reached a tipping point where we can no longer depend on ongoing industrial growth and need to move people back into the country to take up the surplus labor from the city
• ALSO, the farmer may not have to hire a bunch of laborers for harvest, because he will have the labor necessary on site to handle the harvest, as 4 acres of corn is not an overwhelming amount and sufficient labor can be kept employed the rest of the year at other tasks due to the diversity of on-farm operations; e.g. livestock, forestry, fiber, homestead activities (fixing the roof), etc.

Jack also suggests people start producing 10-25% of their own food locally, so farmers don't have to make as much for us.

So what would it mean to move people back into agriculture?

It might look like this:

Agriculture would need to become more labor intensive if more people were to be employed farming. To have stable employment on the land, you would need a diversified family farm-type model, otherwise you will need large labor inputs at particular times which means a large demand for migratory labor, which is problematic. A diversified family farm would likely result in better soil fertility and higher yields - along with more work but the work would be spread more evenly throughout the year. More farm income would be re-invested back into individual farms, which traditionally prevented capital accumulation, but chances are good that industry is well-enough developed at this point that capital would still exist for useful large-scale infrastructure projects, though on credit. Cooperatives could play a strong role in this if we'd rather keep creditors, the state, and large-scale capitalist agribusiness out.

The price of food would go up but wages in all other sectors would also go up due to less labor competition in other sectors. This would be the inverse of the scenario Doreen Warriner demonstrates in her book. Probably the price of food would rise more than wages, so the proportion of income a family spent on food would increase. The consumer would be paying for farm biodiversity and soil conservation. Some of the additional costs of labor-intensive agriculture, however, would be defrayed by the fact that the farmer would also be providing for more of their own needs, due to the availability of their own labor during the down periods of the farm cycle. In other words, they would need less disposable income because they could be growing and making more of their own stuff, or via a cooperative enterprise (e.g., a community-owned biogas plant for transforming farm waste). A diversity of on-farm enterprises would also create economic resilience for individual farms.

Support for this theory from Warriner: In the scenario (c. 1939) where Western European tariffs were removed, Eastern European wheat would come in at half the cost (I assume the equilibrium would be reached for both at around 75% the pre-tariff cost)...

In Western Europe the industrial population would gain through cheaper food, but would find the adjustment in the labour market through the influx of labor from the land a very serious one...Free trade inside Europe would inevitably mean a big displacement of labour in the West. (p197)

We can assume that the original decrease of food costs as a result of large-scale mechanization had a comparable impact on the population of the U.S., sending many farmers into the industrial labor pool. We need only reverse this pattern to see that sending people back out of the industrial labor pool and onto farms would have the opposite effect of increasing food costs and decreasing labor competition. Food prices go up, wages go up. In fact, in the foreward, she notes the reversal that came as a result of Eastern Europe becoming a net importer of grain in the years between 1939-1964:

So the priorities of 1939 are now reversed. Then industrial development was the first; now it is increased food production. The movement of population into industry creates a demand for food which agriculture cannot supply, partly for lack of capital, and partly for lack of incentive.

A big potential issue affecting the livelihoods of the new small farmers, however, would be land ownership. If the massive tracts of land currently owned by agribusiness were rented out, or if farmers were hired on as independent contractors working a chunk of land in a way that's dictated by the landowners, you would have virtual serfdom. The landowners could charge enough to make farming anything but lucrative. Farmers would need to own their land for this to work well. It's the difference between the Bulgarian peasants (land-owning, organized) and the Hungarian peasants (landless, disorganized) in the 1930s. It's hard to imagine this working in the U.S. without some sort of land reform, which is tough to imagine at all. Even in an era of smaller-scale farming (due to peak oil or what-have-you), the large land-owning agribusiness giants could easily turn into something like feudal lords.

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

Ronald Wright's Massey Lectures:

Jumping off point on youtube:



"Farming increased quantity, but not quality...results in famine." (part II #3)

Capital accumulation - a thought experiment 3

Part 1
Part 2

So how does labor result in capital accumulation?

You are a hunter-gatherer living in the forest 10,000 years ago. When you wake up in the morning, you have approximately 16 hours before you go to sleep again, which is your available time per day to do things, to labor. The amount of work you put into anything can be thought of as a product of the amount of time you spend on it and the amount of effort you put into it. LABOR = TIME * EFFORT. For simplicity, let's say that effort is simply the energy, in calories, that you expend doing the work.

(Preview of coming attractions: PRODUCTIVITY = LABOR * CAPITAL... a product of how hard you work and your training, available tools, etc.)

Only once you have done everything you need to do to ensure your survival until the next day can you move on to other things. Your labor is first and foremost dedicated to your immediate survival, after which you move on to ensuring your ongoing survival to the best of your ability. Immediate needs include not starving, not freezing, not being eaten by a tiger, and so on. These tend to be reactive. Ensuring your ongoing survival means expending additional effort to proactively plan for ensuring these needs are met in the future. This might mean laying (or making) a trap line, gathering storable tubers, building a hut, or tanning a hide.

Let's consider this in terms of stocks and flows. Your basic needs are a stock that needs to be kept at a certain level to ensure your immediate survival, and your labor is the inflow which maintains this basic level of stock. Labor is also an outflow, in that work takes energy--you get energy from the food you work to procure, and spend some of that energy procuring food. Generally it more than pays for itself, which results in surplus. The difference between how much energy it takes you to procure food and how much energy the food gives you is the first labor surplus, a surplus of energy.

CALORIES GAINED FROM PREY - CALORIES EXPENDED DURING HUNT = ENERGY SURPLUS

If you're below the line here, you're in trouble, and aren't going to live for very long. If you're above the line, however, you have your first bit of extra energy which can be used for another activity. What are you going to do with it?

Option A: Build a better spear
Option B: Build a hut
Option C: Learn a cool dance move to impress a potential mate

Which you decide to do depends on which option you think is most useful and how secure you feel in your current predicament. If you're just barely coming out ahead, and your main problem is that you're sleeping outside and burning a lot of calories trying to stay warm, you might want to build a hut. If your main problem is that it took you ten throws before your spear pierced a deer, you might want to build a better spear. Either way, unless you're feeling pretty secure in your ability to consistently procure more calories than you expend procuring them, you're not likely to be focusing on cool dance moves.

Now, consider the scenario in which you decide to build a better spear. You now have two spears. If you don't want to be carrying both of them, you might decide to give the old one to your hunting buddy, who broke his last week. Two things just happened here:

1. your surplus of energy resulted in net capital accumulation for your little hunting society, which benefits both of you by (a) getting your buddy back in the game quicker, (b) getting your buddy back in the game quicker...the first for his sake and the second for yours

2. your buddy now owes you one. He may use some of his surplus energy sometime down the line to teach you a cool dance move.

This is net social capital accumulation. It occurs when your society captures the surplus value from work. The spear is the product of the energy of your labor and the materials used in its construction. Your surplus energy resulted in an extra tool. How valuable it is depends on not just on the time you spent making it but on how well it's made (skill, or human capital). Once brought into existence by your flow of labor, this tool increases your stock slightly above the level needed for bare survival, and frees up a bit of time for something other than spearmaking to occur. It also provides a buffer against disaster, in that if your new spear breaks, your buddy still has one (or if you kept it, you have an extra), and this can be all the difference in tiding you over till you get a new one.

To be continued...

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.

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."

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.

Culture as the defining element

High-performing cities stay high-performing cities, according to Geoffrey B. West, regardless of what industries come and go and what the national economy does. Culture is the most long-lasting of human creations and the hardest to kill. What is resilient culture? If culture is the lynchpin of resilience -- and of well-being -- how do we fortify it, help to create it, or enable it?

Home Energy Generation

Steven Harris' Knowledge Publications series of books including Making Fuel at Home. Education site. Fuels video:


Generator by ftcenergy.





Biogas from cowshit for methane production for cooking and heating.
Biogas 3
3 Cubic Meter Biogas Plant

Biogas to Electricity.


Solar1234.com low/hi tech products.

Training centers:
Evergreen Institute in East-Central Missouri.
University of Colorado at Boulder Sustainable Practices Program
Solar Energy International in Carbondale, CO
Solar Living Institute in Mendocino, CA
(Both of the above offer work-trade internship programs, from 16 weeks to 7 months, Apr 1-Oct30)
Guide to Renewable Energy Training and Education

"Sustainable Community Development"

Is this my field?

Heard it described as Gwendolyn Hallsmith's shtick here.

Wiki has entries for community development and for sustainable development.

Where can liberals and conservatives agree? Local currencies, organic ag, sustainable (resilient) communities, etc. AND, how to make sure the "poor and disenfranchised" don't become serf communities adjacent to or within better-off communities?

And more on local currencies, since that's what the podcast's about:

"The things that complementary currencies do best is connecting underutilized resources with unmnet needs [e.g. people who want to work but don't have work, theatres that have seats to offer but aren't selling all their tickets, etc.]"

The Omnivore's Advantage

Blog entry by John Robb

The gist:

"Specialization can:

- offer access to extremely dense and high value sources of energy
- provide protection from competitors (few competitors will have the specialization necessary to access it)

"However, when the environment is in a period of rapid flux, specialists can rapidly become extinct. Simply: its favorite sources of energy can dry up or become inaccessible as conditions change. In contrast, the generalist or omnivore, can thrive when the environment is in flux.

"We're living through a period of rapid change. Flux. Things are going get very different much quicker than most people assume. As a result, we need to adopt more of an omnivore strategy in regards to nearly everything we do. For example:

1. Skills. The more specialized your role/job, the less valuable and/or useless you are in the future. Re-skill. Broaden your knowledge. There will be few things more pathetic (albeit hilarious) than seeing a former $500 an hour lawyer or Wall Street Tycoon in a breadline.
2. Investments. An omnivorous investment strategy isn't hedging. Hedging still assumes most of what you own is still considered a financial asset. An omnivorous investment strategy puts resources into communities and technologies that will be there even when most financial assets are imploding."

"Power to the People" - Open source response to open source warfare

Article by John Robb about open-source warfare and the only secure response: self-organizing smaller societies, independence, and resilience.

The rich and the middle class will develop their own solutions, but:

"As for those without the means to build their own defense, they will have to make do with the remains of the national system. They will gravitate to America's cities, where they will be subject to ubiquitous surveillance and marginal or nonexistent services. For the poor, there will be no other refuge...

"Until, that is, the next wave of adaptive innovation takes hold. For all of these changes may prove to be exactly the kind of creative destruction we need to move beyond the current, failed state of affairs. By 2016 and beyond, real long-term solutions will emerge. Cities, most acutely affected by the new disruptions, will move fastest to become self-reliant, drawing from a wellspring of new ideas the market will put forward. These will range from building-based solar systems from firms such as Energy Innovations to privatized disaster and counterterrorist responses. We will also see the emergence of packaged software that combines real-time information (the status of first-responder units and facilities) with interactive content (information from citizens) and rich sources of data (satellite maps). Corporate communications monopolies will crumble as cities build their own emergency wireless networks using simple products from companies such as Proxim...

"By 2016, we may see the trials of the previous decade as progress in disguise. The grassroots security effort will do more than just insulate our gas lines and high schools. It will also spur positive social change: So-called green systems will quickly shed their tree-hugger status and be seen as vital components of our economic and personal security...

"Perhaps the most important global shift will be the rise of grassroots action and cross-connected communities. Like the Internet, these new networks will develop slowly at first. After a period of exponential growth, however, they will quickly become all but ubiquitous--and astonishingly powerful, perhaps as powerful as the networks arrayed against us. And so we will all become security consultants, taking an active role in deciding how it is bought, structured, and applied. That's a great responsibility and, with luck, an enormous opportunity. Choose wisely."

John Robb's blog: http://globalguerrillas.typepad.com/

The Nature of Economies (Jane Jacobs)

Jane Jacobs major points in the book:

(coming soon)

(Photo courtesy of Streetsblog.org)

And my thought: if rural areas--and Detroit--act like arid regions in their failure to hold and find multiple uses for energy (or imports), and thus energy leaves the system almost as quickly as it enters (as exports), and thus economies are poorly developed (or poorly expanded), how does this notion of "capturing and holding energy" and "producing surplus" (to borrow from permaculture) apply to the individual home? To home economics?

A house imports everything: building materials, energy, water, decoration, tools, dishes, furniture, home electronics, appliances, clothing, communications, etc. It exports a person, or people - productive economic participants. How might it capture and use more of this energy and become more of a unit of production itself?

For reflection: this interview with the authors of "The Urban Homestead" by The Survival Podcast's Jack Spirko. Jack's got a great notion of converting the home from a consumer to a producer.

Trees as design challenge

"The book itself is a polymer, it is not a tree. Imagine this design assigment: Design something that makes oxygen, sequesters carbon, fixes nitrogen, distills water, accrues solar energy as fuel and makes complex sugars and food, creates microclimates, changes colors with the seasons, and self-replicates... Why don't we knock that down and write on it."

Will McDonough on his TED Talk on his book Cradle-to-Cradle.