Reading Environment, Power, and Society

I've been reading Howard Odum's Environment Power and Society. I don't read technical stuff well. Odum says that it's a work for popular consumption. I see how it could be more difficult, but a lot of new concepts come at you on each page.

Odum's goal for the book is to communicate a "macroscopic" -- as opposed to reductionist -- view of the world. He discusses the flows of power in ecosystems -- of which human economy is an example -- and suggests that human survival depends upon understanding the energetics of systems. He writes, "Since decisions on such matters in the arena of public affairs are ultimately made according to the beliefs of the citizens, it is the citizens who must somehow include the energetics of systems in their education."

I'll bite. I'm happy to be able to run my eyes over Odum's discussions of the power flows in various ecosystems. I'm grateful to him for providing a vocabulary of symbols used in network diagrams, such as the one above, which illustrates the flows of carbon in a microcosm. P=gross photosynthesis. R=respiration. Hexagons are self reproducing systems, either organisms or populations. The bulge on the left indicates plants as labeled. The things with roof are supposed to look like tanks, and stand for storage.

Theory Of This Moment In History

 Northeast Minneapolis is the big-shouldered part of town, where rail yards rub shoulders with supper clubs, the homes of  hard-working, no-nonsense Slavs, and oddly enough artist's studios and galleries. I went there earlier this evening to take photos for what follows, and wound up feeling Antonionesque.


There is human progress. People who looked like us dwelt in Africa a couple hundred thousand years ago. We started walking out of Africa about 70 thousand years ago, had language, games, trade, music, and painting 20 thousand years after that, and made it to the Americas 15 thousand or so years before our time. Agriculture appeared independently in Eurasia, Asia, and the Americas six to ten thousand years ago, and spread rapidly (by conquest) from each center. We wrote four thousand years ago, and alloyed bronze five hundred years later.

The organization of various empires shortly after that, and the institution of various religions observed today, between 1000BCE, and the Common Era, indicates that societies had wealth they could divert from survival to the propagation of their existential points of view.

Societies adapt to circumstances, and their adaptations are complex and linked. Pull one lever, and pull all the levers that help it do its job and the ones that it’s supposed to help. While circumstances remain the same, this is good; when circumstances change, societies find it difficult to adapt, because the necessary changes interfere with adaptations to adaptations, and the members are reluctant to allow what looks like chaos and loss. Consequently, with the stakes never higher, societies find it nearly impossible to intervene in the most effective of systems theorist Donella Meadow’s ten places to intervene in a system (paradigms), and settle for the easiest (numbers). Rome began to evacuate Britain in 383 CE, and civiliztion napped, albeit uncomfortably, for the next four hundred years. Then Charlemagne began consolidating a Frankish Empire.

Around a thousand years ago, European frontier outposts became the cities that we know, and the capitals began large public works like bridges. Coincidentally, this was about when India began using zero as a place holder in computation.

In the mid-fourteenth century, the Black Death reduced world population by about a fifth (and Europe’s by up to 60%). There is modern speculation that the smaller population’s lowered need for combustion contributed to a global cooling called the “Little Ice Age” in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. In spite of the population crisis and the cold, the Little Ice Age hosted the Renaissance, a time of artistic flowering, technological innovation (streetlights, movable type, firearms), and European global exploration.

European colonization of the globe, particularly the Americas, increased its wealth, not so much by allowing Europe to import materials, but by giving it new, sparsely settled continents into which its population could expand. (This is definitely a Euro-centric narrative, partly because European-American history is what I know, but mostly because Europe and America have been the dynamic, if not always wise, actors in the globalization of the last half millennium.)

European deforestation forced a switch from charcoal to the higher quality -- but more difficult to produce -- fuel, coal, in the early to mid-eighteenth century. This began the Industrial Revolution.

The nineteenth century was a period of feverish technological innovation, one innovation being the oil well in 1856. Oil is a higher quality fuel than coal, and allowed automobiles and flight.

Innovation continued through the twentieth century and persists, but much of the twentieth century’s gifts have cultivated a comprehensive and detailed understanding of ourselves, our world, and our place in the world, that contradicts both inherited and intuitive understandings (the periodic table, evolution versus Genesis, relativity and quantum physics versus Newton, connectedness versus reductionism).

We have not been perfect at providing for every human being, but in spite of a steep increase in the number of people, the twentieth century saw a higher percentage of human beings fed, and fed better, than ever before in history. Archeological evidence (Steven LeBlanc’s Constant Battles) also shows that it was a period of relative peace, measured by percentage of population to die violently, in spite of two world wars, various proxy wars, decolonization, and many civil wars and revolutions.  (Assuming 100 million deaths as the result of WWII and Stalinism together, this is four-point-something percent of the planet's 1940 population of 2.3 billion; contemporary stone age hunters lose a quarter of adult males, five percent of adult females, and some children to warfare; there are no noble savages.)Technological optimists believe that our science and engineering, such as hybrid grain, fertilizers, and pesticides, have been responsible. People ate, who otherwise wouldn’t have eaten, because of the Green Revolution, improvements in communication, manufacturing, transportation, and so on.

But it was the high-quality fuels that made the innovations possible, and that allow us to continue to use them. We turn oil into food, and we live at the culmination of more than one thousand years of economic expansion. We have walked on the Moon, and freed ourselves from smallpox. We wiped out smallpox! High quality fuels, and Europe’s increased carrying capacity, acquired by annexing the Americas and Australia, have given us prosperity, understanding, and luxury. Maybe we got a counter-intuitive boost from the plague, too.

We have filled the continents; there are no more frontiers. From now on, the high-quality fuels will become harder to get, and more harmful to use. You might say that we have converted coal and oil into food and knowledge. Now we confront the world’s carrying capacity for ourselves. Populations don’t survive confrontation with carrying capacity for long. Circumstances are changing, and we face collapse. Twenty-first century civilization is more complex and full of linkages than any of our extinct predecessors. It's never been harder to do the right thing. Each of us has more to lose, understanding requires tough intellectual work, and there's an attitude at large that we have an existential right to believe any dumb thing we want to.

Progress must continue;  I think something in our character demands it; but progress must be in finding ways to mimic the relationships we witness in nature, and in linking with them. The wealth that will allow us to continue will come from ways that our genius can use those relationships without damaging the whole, not from appropriating and squandering irreplaceable fossil capital. Everyone’s life will change, yours and mine painfully. It will be better. For the first time in billions of years of life, a species with full understanding will fill its ecological niche, one that it designed! (The paradox or irony is merely apparent; our new complexity would be increasingly aligned with the broadest and most enduring system known.)

And we get bragging points for doing what none (USSR, Czechoslovakia, and South Africa have made essays at it) have done: changing our society's basic paradigms.

I Can't Read Our Permanent Address

The text lettered on this painting is the last paragraph in this post.

I painted this around 1990. I’ve tried to pin the date down by remembering where I got the canvas. It’s a piece of muslin, with a crude print in green and white of an elephant and foliage. You can still see a ghost of the design from behind. It was an employer’s cast-off, but I can’t remember whose, and I changed jobs about the time I painted it.

The picture of the dome-dwellin’ hippies who have just converted a VW Bug into a horse-drawn buggy does a pretty good job of illustrating the quote, taken from the writings of a biologist and inventor named John Todd. When I started painting, I wasn’t thinking of putting words in. I tried a couple of things to fill the foreground around the car. They didn’t work. I’d been researching John Todd a year or so earlier, and lifted an appropriate passage. My sloganeering reminded Barbara and me, both, of a bunch of semi-trailers we used to see in Lamoille, Illinois (just a little north of where US 34 crosses I-80). Some put-upon soul was using them as billboards in his public relations war with the county. There were a couple hundred words of argument, and we’d see them after a few hours of driving and just before we were due at Barbara’s father’s, so we never stopped, and we never learned what the megillah was about.

(No responsible horse owners would ever allow that fencepost with the loose bobwire in their pasture. I liked the way it kept my eyes from leaking off the canvas, though, so I left it.)

I entered the painting in a group show, back in April. It was the occasion of a couple of conversations with other, more painterly and less “anecdotal”, artists. The conversation that I remember most, though, was with a friend who dropped in to support me. Mark thought the quote was incomprehensible, and probably thought the reason was ostentatious vocabulary. I’ve tried since then to rewrite it, but I haven’t been able to keep its meaning, and make it more accessible, without making it longer.

Maybe somebody else could take a stab at it.

“Tomorrow is our permanent address. It is the structure or morphology of a system that determines its behavior and subsequently its fate. The coefficients or parameters within a system
determine only rates and relative dominance. This distinction is significant since current attempts to adapt technological society to changing conditions are focused on coefficients which are not fate-determining.”

Bill Mollison Permaculture & Abundance

Korean War-era Tasmanian Bill Mollison developed permaculture in the early ‘seventies with younger Aussie, David Holmgren. In the Global Gardener video series, Mollison said, “In the late ‘sixties I was protesting social and environmental issues. But by the early ‘seventies, I decided that protest wasn’t good enough. So I commenced designing gardens and positive design systems for human habitation.”

What he means is that social and environmental ills come out of scarcity, and he meant to pitch in on the side of abundance. People starve because of scarcity; that’s a no-brainer. The next step is that people worry that somebody will steal what they have, so they organize to defend themselves and their treasure...and maybe swipe a little of somebody else’s. After that we soil our own nests because we don’t have, or believe we don’t have, the means to keep them clean. Mollison believes that by studying natural systems and trying to imitate them, people could cultivate plenty. A variation on Buckminster Fuller’s thought that, “If you want to change a system you cannot amend it. A new system which makes the old one obsolete is the only true change.”

Homo sap hasn’t really figured out yet what it is, and figuring it out means fitting in with all the other living things on Planet Gaia. Permaculture is still at the pre-Model-T stage, but by following its principles and ethics, our species will come of age.

Yeah, but what is it? Here’s what David Holmgren says: "Consciously designed landscapes which mimic the patterns and relationships found in nature, while yielding an abundance of food, fibre and energy for provision of local needs."

Here in Minnesota, and much of the central United States, what you do is try to mimic the native oak savanna, substituting plants that will fulfill your needs. Anchor your garden with oak or, more usefully, a chestnut or two. Below that, plant hazelnuts, apples, and cherries, with grapes trellised on the branches. The next story is fruiting shrubs, bush cherries, currants, gooseberries, blueberries, etc., oriented to the larger plants according to how much sun they need. Then herbaceous perennials, pollinator attractors, pest repellants, long-rooted plants to bring minerals from deep in the soil to the surface, and nitrogen fixers. Bees, ducks, chickens, hogs, etc., according to your site. Mushrooms, medicinals, ginseng.

1. Observe and interact;
2. Catch and store energy;
3. Obtain a yield;
4. Apply self-regulation and accept feedback;
5. Use and value renewable resources and services;
6. Produce no waste;
7. Design from patterns to details;
8. Integrate rather than segregate;
9. Use small and slow solutions;
10. Use and value diversity;
11. Use edges and value the marginal;
12. Creatively use and respond to change.

Criticism has mostly been that permaculturists import non-native, invasive species, and that mature, or “climax,” ecosytems are not very productive of fruit, etc. The invasive-species critique may have been true once. I found reading Mollison infuriating because I wasn’t familiar with the species he prescribed. Maybe people with more expertise jumped the gun and tried to build Tasmanian ecosystems in the US. The fact is that current Minnesotan and Wisconsin permaculturists use familiar plants. As for the objection that climax ecosystems aren’t productive from a human point of view, that’s a management problem. Finesse it by thinning, planting, pruning, coppicing, and you wind up with a kind of bonsai ecosystem. Even if what we call “permaculture” were shown to be humanly useless, the objective of designing “landscapes which mimic the patterns and relationships found in nature, while yielding an abundance of food, fibre and energy," or at least figuring how to do that, is the best use of human time as of the early 21st century.

Access:

Permaculture Activist Magazine -- Good, dry articles about permaculture in the US, with beautiful color covers;

Permaculture 101 -- Series of short videos about permaculture;

Midwest Permaculture -- Three designers in Wisconsin and Illinois who offer instruction (my teachers); these guys say their style of food growing has an eighteen hundred-year rotation; they also claim you can get 25% more ethanol per-acre from apples than from corn, and you can graze the orchard, since you aren't worried about human consumption of fecal coliform bacteria;

Permaculture Research Institute - Cold Climate -- Minnesota-based designers working to learn more.