A plea for the translucent university: an undisciplined thought-piece on the prospects for disciplined thought

In the last post, I limned out one of Leopold Kohr's suggestions for overdeveloped societies such as ours: Contraction to Uninstrumented Visibility.  Though an admittedly technical phrase, I find that it concisely expresses a vital dimension of attaining social equity and environmental sustainability that often goes unrecognized.  E. F. Schumacher captured the rationale behind the CUV approach in his own inimitable way: "There is wisdom in smallness, if only on account of the smallness and patchiness of human knowledge, which relies on experience far more than understanding."  If you'd like a good historical account of the socially and environmentally disastrous outcomes caused by the confusion of understanding with experience, check out James Scott's Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (1999).  Although Scott focuses on the pitfalls of a fundamentalist belief in expertise and top-down social engineering, one could just as easily observe the human and ecological wreckage caused by a fundamentalist belief in capitalism and free market globalization.

The CUV approach draws attention to the diseconomies of scale that are hidden below a merely superficial view of our economy.  Kohr emphasized the high cost of "instrumented visibility"--that is, dependence on data collection and processing, theories, statistics, viability studies, analyses, etc.--required to run highly developed societies.  You could call this sort of instrumented visibility "mediated experience."  Once an optimal threshold of development has been passed, Kohr argued, the capacity to turn information into useful experience declines in a manner similar to the other diseconomies of scale.  The cost of figuring out a problem caused by development, and doing something about it, increases in scale faster than the benefits derived from said development.  Or, as Anatol Murad put it, "Each further step in the direction of integration, consolidation, automation, then begins to contribute not to the solution of problems, but their scale."  Each person theoretically has access to vastly more information than ever before, and we as a society can manipulate our environment far more than ever before.  But this has come at the cost of each person's area of experience becoming narrower and narrower in a surrounding swamp of greater and greater ignorance.  We might be masters of our own tiny domains, but we haven't the faintest idea whether the direction  in which we are all collectively going is good or bad.  When it becomes clear that the direction is bad--as with, e.g., global climate change or Peak Oil--the issue seems so vast that individual paralysis sets in. 

In this post, I would like to focus on how overdevelopment has compromised academia in much the same way as other aspects of our living arrangement.  As a Ph.D. candidate, I currently occupy a position somewhere in the middle stories of an academic edifice that I feel quite uncomfortable inhabiting.  It will probably collapse in the foreseeable future in any case.  I neglected to bring up this collapse bit in my previous post in any depth.  Besides the argument that we should take the CUV approach to both improve living standards and overcome our inertia in dealing with global climate change, it is becoming clear that we have to anyway, and soon.  The reason for this is the decline in global petroleum supplies (Peak Oil), and the corresponding declines in other key resources (metals, fertilizers, etc.).  By all reasonable indicators, Peak Oil is going on right now.  As I've pointed out previously, the current configuration of persons, things, and ideas that we call "modern civilization" requires a great deal of socioeconomic complexity--that is, specialization, the division of labor, etc.  Increasing socioeconomic complexity requires increasing surpluses of energy and material.  When these surpluses cease to exist and start to decline, societies need to simplify.  This means less specialization, less political integration, and less economic interdependence.  I cannot do better than recommend John Michael Greer's explanation of the process.  Additionally, Greer's piece helps to strip the term "collapse" of its pejorative connotations, which is helpful in light of the fact that the CUV approach is essentially a controlled form of it.  I have not found a single convincing argument that we will find a replacement (or array of replacements ) for fossil fuel energy any time soon, so I am forced to assume that simplification is imminent.

So how does academia fit into this picture?  The trend toward greater complexity and specialization made possible by fossil fuels applies to academia as much as anywhere else.  Although universities, like governmental and religious establishments, often stress their long-held and august traditions, its role in society underwent some profound changes in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.  Many of these changes, I would argue, have left academia badly maladapted for what is coming at us in the near future.  I'll do my best to explain why I think this is the case.  

The real innovators of the university in the nineteenth century were the scientists, whose knowledge of natural phenomena was advancing with ever-accelerating speed, and who required a novel structure for disseminating and testing their hypotheses.  The fields of inquiry that would eventually become chemistry, biology, physics, geology, ecology, etc. had previously been the domain of gentlemen scholars, the medical trades, and craftsmen in the "mechanical arts."  Their incorporation into the university was part of a larger tendency whereby science gained more prestige and importance in society as a whole.  Although, counterfactually, this shift almost certainly would have happened without the bursting onto the scene of fossil-fueled technologies, they had a profound impact on the particular shape that "science" would take.  

The increasing funding of the sciences, both applied and basic, became necessary for the continuation of industrialization by the end of the nineteenth century.  This fact was not lost on power holders and the public.  Besides the legitimate concern for improving living standards using scientific methods (which strictly speaking didn't require fossil-fueled industrialization at all), there was a competitive impulse at play.  To maintain both economic and military viability in a rapidly changing world, it became clear that it was no longer adequate to rely on amateurish, unsystematic approaches to mastering the material world.  As in society at large, specialization and professionalism in the sciences exploded, as did investment in "scientific infrastructure," such as laboratories, journals, repositories, and philanthropic and state funding organizations.  Any doubt about the need for a well-heeled scientific establishment were put to rest by the invention and deployment of the atomic bomb during World War II.  It was seen as the culmination of pure and applied sciences, engineering know-how, highly sophisticated instrumentation, and government support.

Underpinning this heady change was an emerging assumption, shared by all the mainstream political ideologies of the modern era.  They were all rooted in a belief that industrialism, professionalism, and scientific knowledge would continue to grow indefinitely.  This belief influenced all of academia, and not just the sciences.  By the 1890s at the latest, "progress" had become the standard by which universities measured themselves.   For centuries previously, it was the job of the university to preserve and transmit an eternal body of knowledge, in which all the other branches were seen as sub-disciplines of theology.  "Free thinking" generally had to take place extra muros.  But from the latter half of the nineteenth century onward, the university was generally seen as a creator of  new knowledge .  Under this new conception, the teaching (transmission) function and the research (novelty) function became essentially one and the same.  Education was no longer about replication, but advancement and innovation.  Each succeeding generation of students was supposed to start with the advantages their predecessors had won.  On this view, according to Andrew Delblanco, "history becomes a sort of relay race, in which no runner retreads trodden ground--an idea fundamentally at odds with the meaning of humanistic knowledge, which must be re-learned by each generation, and put to the test of individual experience."  Particularly from the post-World War II years onward, the idea was that the university would train the next generation of professionals--businessmen, scientists, educators, statesmen--who in turn would generate more "development," allowing for more funding of the university in the next generation, and so on, ad nauseum.  

As part and parcel of this change, the faculty of the university were transformed from a pastoral or curatorial to a professional role.  Humanists tried, in keeping with the times, to refashion themselves on the scientific model.  The emergence in the late 1800s and early 1900s of the "social sciences," with their insistence on "methodology," was one such response.  Professional organizations and credentialing standards arose, and the site for scholarly exchange shifted from the local campus, cafe, or public forum to the national or international peer group.  The humanities developed an incentive system similar to that of the sciences: attaining a Ph.D. or tenure requires that one do "novel" or "original" research in a particular specialized topic, which itself was supposed to fit into some specialized field.  Graduate students are absolutely admonished from writing for a wider audience.  Although this form of training and policing certainly has its virtues, a serious problem of overproduction has arisen, with scholars in the same discipline hardly reading each other's work anymore, let alone across disciplines.  A professor could try to "go public," but only after a safely long gestation inside the rather different academic environment.

These incentives have had some far-reaching structural effects.  One is to push the faculty, using the terminology of David Riesman and Christopher Jencks in The Academic Revolution (1968), toward the academic and away from the intellectual.  An academic question is "one raised by some lacuna or ambiguity in the data or interpretations of a... discipline.  It is a question asked by one's colleagues or on their behalf, and answered primarily as a service to those colleagues."  An intellectual, conversely, is a kind of amateur.  He or she asks questions not about internal professional debates, but about experience. (Recall the distinction drawn above.)  And an intellectual's natural audience is the broader public within and beyond the university.  

The upshot of increased academization has been the creation of many areas of intellectual pursuit whose wider relevance in a future of smaller energy (read: money) surpluses is entirely questionable.  I am guessing that there will be little public sympathy for continued support of, say, some arcane debate in astrophysics or linguistics if the highway system is falling apart.  But, as it now stands, most well-established members of academia have utterly no incentives to bother changing course.  What's worse, masses of recently credentialed specialists are trying desperately to jump onto the careening academic ship while they still can, hoping to do so before it sinks, or totally unaware that it is going to.  

But, to return to the earlier line of argument regarding the CUV approach, this could be a blessing in disguise.  Much of the specialization and professionalism in which we have indulged over the past decades has actually been quite needless and counterproductive.  If we want to prevent academia from reverting back to becoming the preserve of the very wealthy and powerful (even more so than it is now), we need to consider the essential purpose of the university--finding the truth--and provide the means for attaining this as equitably as possible.  I'll save my more specific (still quite speculative) proposals on the issue for a future post.  But the general gist of my case is that the university would benefit by re-scaling its operations in much the same way as other aspects of society.  Academia should become more translucent.  In other words, the barriers, literally and figuratively, between the university and the public should become more porous, but not completely so.  To be clear, I am not making a mock-populist jab at "academia."  Its mores and practices are vital for civilization.

To close, I would like to return to something of considerable relevance that Leopold Kohr wrote in The Breakdown of Nations (1957).  The "efficiency of the small," according to Kohr, applies not just to the political and economic, but to the the intellectual and cultural spheres as well.  (Note: When he refers to "large" and "small" states, he doesn't mean it in an exclusively political or geographical sense.  There are a number of other criteria, which have come up on this blog before, having to do with the degree of mobility, specialization, etc.).  Here Kohr is examining the reason behind the "intense cultural productivity of the small, and the intellectual sterility of the large, state":

Societies may have patrons of the arts as rulers.  But even so they could do little without artists.  And they may provide the facilities for leisure and musing.  But, again, these alone might not produce the creative impulse.  What is needed in addition is the opportunity for individuals to learn the truth without which neither art, nor literature, nor philosophy can be developed.  But to learn the truth in a world that is as manifold as ours and which manifests itself in such countless forms, incidents, and relationships, a creative individual must be able to participate in a great variety of personal experiences.  Not in a great number, but in a great variety.  And this is infinitely easier in a small state than in a large one.

In a large state, we are forced to live in tightly specialized compartments, since populous societies not only make large-scale specialization possible but necessary.  As a result, our life's experience is confined to a narrow segment whose borders we almost never cross, but within which we become great single-purpose experts.... 

Instead of experiencing many different things within surveyable limits, as did our enviable ancestors, we experience only one thing on a colossal plane.  But this we experience innumerable times.  Mechanics now only meet mechanics, doctors doctors, commercial artists commercial artists, garment workers garment workers, journalists journalists....

Because modern life makes it technically impossible to participate in manifold experiences, anything written nowadays in the massive crowd states is drawn not from life, but from the co-ordinated study of life.  The world no longer crosses an author's path.  He must go out of his way and discover it indirectly and laboriously from the encyclopedias and monographs, or from the writings of other hard-working students....  

The great advantage of the little state then is that, once it has 'attained a population sufficient for a good life in the political community,' it offers not only the advantages of a reasonable degree of specialization but also the opportunity for everybody to experience everything simply by looking out the window.  There is no passion or problem disturbing the heart of man or the peace of a large empire that would not exist also in a small country.  But in contrast to the large empire, where their meaning lies hidden under the weight of countless duplications and in a multitude of disjointed specialized realms, they unfold themselves without the intermediary of analysts and experts before the eyes of everybody, and with a clarity of outline and purpose that cannot be perceived elsewhere.  A small state has the same governmental problems as the most monumental power on earth, even as a small circle has the same number of degrees as a large one.  But what in the latter cannot be discerned by an army of statisticians and specialized interpreters, could be perceived by every leisurely stroller in ancient Athens.  As a result, if we really want to go to the bottom of things, we have even today no other recourse after having tried Harvard and Oxford than to take down from their dusty shelves Plato or Aristotle.  Indeed, the worth of Harvard and Oxford lies largely in the fact that they keep on their shelves the great men of little states.

Yet these were no supermen.  The secret of their wisdom was that they lived in a small society that displayed all the secrets of life before everybody's eyes.  They saw each problem not as a giant part of an unsurveyable tableau, but as a fraction of the composite picture to which it belonged.  Philosophers, as also poets and artists, were by nature universal geniuses because they also saw the totality of life in its full richness, variety, and harmony without having to rely on secondhand information or to resort to superhuman efforts.

Sustainability and surveyability

In his recent lapidary article, "Why Bother?", Michael Pollan raises one of the major paradoxes of our time: "Cheap energy, which gives us climate change, fosters precisely the mentality that makes dealing with climate change in our own lives seem impossibly difficult.  Specialists ourselves, we can no longer imagine anyone but an expert, or anything but a new technology or law, solving our problems."  Pollan here brings up a neglected, but fundamental, dimension of our troubled relationship with nature and each other.  But, as with many other paradoxes of civilization, figuring out how to maximize the benefits and minimize the pitfalls due to specialization is a messy affair.  This posting is an initial effort at framing the issue, partly by way of intellectual rescue operation, as concisely as possible.

As a fan of civilization, I'm also by default a fan of specialization--within certain thresholds.  Indeed, (here I'm following Colin Duncan), one could safely argue that a society is "developed" or "modern" to the extent that its individuals produce little of what they consume and consume little of what they produce.  The more "developed" or "modern" we are, that is, the more we depend on strangers for the necessities of daily life.  

Adam Smith and many other pioneers of the "social sciences" early on understood that the benefits of civilization require the division of labor.  But Smith was also aware of the spiritually and mentally deadening effect that performing the same simple task over and over could have on a person--and he made this point well before the heyday of the "factory drone." Granted, this wasn't primary in his mind, since he was more concerned--justifiably so given his eighteenth century context--with curtailing aristocratic privilege and bringing about rudimentary forms of equitableness.  Latter-day spokespersons for "free markets" have acknowledged Smith's fears, but they have simply assumed that any potential de-humanization in the labor process is worth all the cheap stuff we now have at our fingertips.  Who cares if you have a monotonous job making products for strangers if compensation comes in the form of iPods and air conditioning?  

Karl Marx, also a fan of the division of labor, focused not only on the inhumane, but also the unjust, aspects of specialization.  It allowed, he observed, for the historic divisions between the expropriating and the expropriated class: master and slave, lord and serf, bourgeoisie and proletariat.  He and Friedrich Engels, and many of their disciples, naively believed that it would be possible to maintain or increase the degree of socioeconomic complexity and eliminate injustice, but their fears are nonetheless well-founded and well-corroborated by others.

So, notwithstanding its long-acknowledged benefits, specialization also has long-acknowledged drawbacks, to which we can now add its tendency to perpetuate environmentally destructive behavior.  I'd like to strike in another direction on this issue, one that was pioneered by an almost entirely forgotten thinker, Leopold Kohr (1909-1994).  In describing his intellectual fate, I hope the value of his particular perspective will become clear.  

Although he was an economics professor for most of his life, much of his work was characterized as "amateurish" or "unscientific."  Besides offending the scientistic pretensions of his colleagues, his perfectly good arguments have been forgotten mainly because he didn't fall easily into the ideological categories that hung like a fog over the intellectual terrain of the twentieth century.  The fog has started to lift, but in the meantime Kohr has died and his ideas sit unread in dusty library stacks.  

In the 1950s and 1960s, Kohr was almost alone in contending, against both the Right and Left, against the technocratic high priests of both MIT and the Kremlin, that the so-called "advanced economies" were in fact badly "overdeveloped."  In an era when big technology, big science, big government projects, big economic blocs, and big cars were de rigeur for policymakers and the public, Kohr was quietly suggesting that "small is beautiful."  (He was mentor and friend to E. F. Schumacher, who wrote the 1973 bestseller, Small is Beautiful: Economics as If People Mattered, which is still very much worth reading.)  In his best-known work, The Breakdown of Nations (1957), Kohr concisely articulated his outlook as follows:

There seems to be only one cause behind all forms of social misery: bigness.  Oversimplified as this may seem, we shall find the idea more easily acceptable if we consider that bigness, or oversize, is really much more than a social problem.  It appears to be the one and only problem permeating all creation.  Whenever something is wrong, something is too big.

Since then, of course, "bigger is better" has fallen out of fashion as the preferred metaphor for the age.  Indeed, the opposite now seems to be the case.  Since the 1970s, the small--the microprocessor, the double helix, the small-team "lean and mean" business model--has displaced the steel factory, the jumbo jet, and the multidivisional corporation as the archetypical symbols for "progress."  But the world didn't seem to absorb Kohr's deeper message.  In fact, we're now even more globally integrated, mobile, and technologically sophisticated.  And yet, by most reasonable metrics (not GDP, by the way), living standards seem to keep degrading, even in the the "developed" countries.

While complicated "development" prescriptions designed for what came to be known as the underdeveloped Third World were flying to and fro among professionals and politicians, Kohr had his own, simpler, prescriptions for the overdeveloped First World.  One of them of particular relevance for this posting is Contraction to Uninstrumented Visibility, or what he called the CUV approach.  CUV, according to Kohr, entailed

a return to the development approach of the Renaissance city-states.  If they succeeded so spectacularly, it was simply because their territories were contracted to dimensions that could be mastered by ordinary mortals without the need of complicated theoretical instruments and statistical radar screens.  Adjusted in size to the small stature God has given us, their problems could therefore by nature never outgrow the genius of their local leaders, or the resources of their natural endowment. (Development Without Aid, 1973, p. 46)

The culmination of the CUV approach is, according to Kohr, the translucent society: one less transparent (and wealthier) than a primitive village but also less opaque (and wealthier) than our present-day First World arrangement.  For Kohr, the apparent savings due to increased specialization and expertise are, once a certain threshold of development has been crossed, illusory.  Given the limits inherent to us humans, it can be better for overall living standards to actually limit specialization and social complexity.  

Central to Kohr's conception of under- and over-development is the distinction he drew between personal and social consumer goods.  The former are goods, be they necessities or luxuries, consumed by individuals.  The latter are goods consumed by society; or, to put it less awkwardly, goods that are necessary for a society's reproduction (e.g., roads, governments, factories).  Kohr also referred to social consumer goods as production, technological, or density commodities, since increases in these areas also increases the level of subsistence. (Think of the move from village green to city hall for carrying out civic business, from stop signs to traffic lights for car-moving business, or from forest clearing to factory mill for lumber-making business.)   These socially oriented goods may or may not improve the sum of personal consumer goods, such as comfortable clothes and habitations, interesting and rewarding work, good food and drink, free time with friends or in solitude, entertainments, clean air, etc.  But we can assume that, if we don't want to live like hunter-gatherers, we'll need to invest in them to some degree.

Most discussions of "economic development" don't include the distinction between personal and social consumer goods.  But it is incredibly important.  What fundamentally matters for (normal) people, at least in regard to the material aspects of life, is not the sum of all of society's "wealth," but the margin of luxury goods they as individuals or households have to enjoy after their basic subsistence needs have been taken care of.  Kohr took a rather common-sense approach and asked: How much technological sophistication, specialization, infrastructure, political hierarchy, etc. do we need in order to optimize this margin of luxuries?  Past this optimal point, Kohr contended, every incremental increase of investment in social consumption might appear to be contributing to economic growth and well-being (the compensatory nature of this consumption of which he drolly captured with the term aspirin standard of living).  But this socially-oriented investment actually diminishes the margin of luxuries available to individuals. Eventually, in other words, people are made worse off by continued growth.  Though consumption, mobility, integration, specialization, etc. may rise, living standards decline.  Kohr's colleague, Anatol Murad, summed up his argument this way:

There is an optimum social size... beyond which a society can grow only at the cost of escalating into difficulties.  Each further step in the direction of integration, consolidation, automation, then begins to contribute not to the solution of problems, but only to their scale.   

[A side note to those in the complex systems theory scene: Yes, Kohr preceded, in his own "amateurish" way, Joseph Tainter's thesis regarding "diminishing marginal returns to complexity" by several decades.  My good friend Matt has helpfully pointed out that Tainter himself has been under-acknowledged in the hullaballoo surrounding Jared Diamond's Collapse.  As early as the 1950s, Kohr hypothesized that the world's most "advanced" economies passed the point of optimal size some time in the twentieth century (see Chapter 4 of Tainter's The Collapse of Complex Societies for some comprehensive post hoc verification on this score).  But the historical details need not detain us here.]

To make Kohr's insights less abstract, I would like to employ an example that I raised in an earlier post: People in "developed" countries, particularly sprawled-out ones such as ours, quite often need cars to get where they need to go.  Feet, not too long ago, used to be the primary mode of transport.  Even though our biological requirements have generally stayed the same, our level of subsistence has increased.  We need to work more and spend more on social consumer goods to satisfy a basic personal necessity (moving).  The cars themselves not only cost thousands of dollars to purchase, maintain, and insure, but think of all the forward and backward linkages in our economy that also need to be paid for: the infrastructure required for petroleum refining and delivery; the trillions of dollars spent on the road system, mining, factories; the millions of jobs around the world dependent on making car parts and assembling them together; the massive bureaucracies involved in highway engineering, construction, tax-collecting, urban planning, and pollution monitoring and abatement; and the various institutions involved in training up the required experts.  Then think, to take just one more linkage, of all the expense and expertise that goes into allowing people in "developed" countries to escape (in their cars) into "wild nature," to "get away from it all."  

All of this "development"--just to move around!--requires a terrific amount of money and specialist knowledge.  This "development" up to now has required a terrific amount of cheap fossil fuel energy; ergo climate change.  Because of the mind-numbingly complex forward and backward linkages involved in automobile dependence, shifting over to "renewable" energy in the powering of the cars is just the tip of the iceberg as far as resource requirements are concerned.  But there is a seductive appeal to staying down the path economic overdevelopment and social opacity.  Specialization is  "conservative" in the sense that it tends to diffuse responsibility for social behaviors that emerge above the level of the individuals contributing to them, thus making it more difficult to figure out how to change directions once a problem has been identified.  Once it becomes apparent that consumerist voluntarism doesn't suffice, there then emerges the process of doing very little at very high cost, which these days takes the form of colloquia, interdisciplinary conferences, forums, committees, dialogues, roundtables, exploratory studies, etc., etc.  The mantra that we live in an "innovative," "fast-changing" society thanks to all our technology and free markets is a terrible oversimplification.  There is a lot of frenetic activity going on, sure, but it's going on within a very stable, very expensive framework of socially-directed investment.  Herein lies the paradox that Pollan pointed out.

Leopold Kohr's views could be immensely helpful in pointing us, at the very least, in the correct general direction.  The CUV approach, if adopted as an orienting device for policy, holds out the possibility of a much cheaper and safer route to an environmentally sustainable good life.  We could (to take another of Kohr's aphorisms) increase the net by diminishing the gross, which would also reduce our resource use at the same time.  

But we need to confront several pervasive myths to have any hope of success.  One of the main barriers, I think, is the immensely powerful "credentialing culture" we've built up, which has reified the overspecialization which Pollan, Kohr, and many others before have warned us about.  The expert in the white lab coat has lost much of the cultural cachet he used to possess, but if our social elite can't see the superfluity of most of the careers they hold and nourish (whether in white lab coat and wingtips or Patagonia fleece and Crocs), we're in deep trouble.  Following the CUV approach is difficult--and revolutionary--in a society chock-full of experts, since the more it succeeds, the less relevant they become.  On the other hand, CUV is highly compatible with a new agrarianism, since a vegetation-based economy is one that tends to be much less nationally and globally connected (via "complicated theoretical instruments and statistical radar screens," to say nothing of fossil fuels).  The operation of a plant-based economy, it's safe to assume, would be much more apprehensible to "ordinary mortals."

Since I'm currently inside the whale, so to speak, I'd like in a future post to discuss how academia is part of the problem, and could be part of the solution, to overdevelopment.

Can tree crops save the planet? Some initial ruminations

In my last post, I commented on the fact that most of the grasses around here are pretty much dead and dry for the year.  We haven't had rain in about two months.  But the trees and shrubs are still very much green and thriving.  By late summer and into autumn, many of these woody plants, both wild and domesticated, will have produced heavy crops of nuts and fruits without a drop of irrigation water.  To satisfy my dilettanti impulses, I would like to turn away from the grasses and make an initial foray into the under-recognized realm of tree crops--that is, domesticated, staple food-producing trees (and woody plants more generally) that have the potential to utterly transform our food, fuel, and fiber supply.   

As I'm wont to do, I would like to begin with some general premises and then move onto the more specific arguments.  One of the main points of this blog is that most of humankind's economic activity depends on photosynthesis.  Only plants can photosynthesize, hence the term "plants are the real capitalists." Since our origin as a species, we have not differed from any other terrestrial animal regarding our physical dependence, either directly or indirectly, on photosynthesizing plants.  The global shift to dependence on fossil fuels in the past couple centuries hasn't changed this fact.  It was photosynthesizing organisms that millions of years ago produced the materia prima for coal, petroleum, and natural gas.

Another of my main points is that "green" non-plant sources of usable energy and other stuff--solar panels, wind turbines, electric cars, high-efficiency appliances--have had fantastically unrealistic expectations placed on them.  It would be more appropriate to think of these technologies as "light brown" or "light gray," which is certainly better than the "dirty" technologies they are replacing.  But they still require highly processed finite materials to build, and they can't get close to fulfilling our energy and material needs (particularly food, but also building materials and portable fuels).  To build the productive base for a future of environmentally benign abundance, we need to shift the focus away from so-called "renewable" and "green" technologies and give far more attention and resources to developing highly productive agricultures.  What I mean by this is indefinitely sustainable cropping systems that provide much more energy and material than they require for their reproduction.  Currently in the "developed" countries, it takes about ten calories of (mostly fossil fuel) energy to produce one calorie of food.  This equation needs to be reversed.  Once we have this primary concern worked out, all the other aspects of a "sustainable" economy should fall into place much more easily. 

One of the most promising ways to build such a productive base is to breed trees and other woody plants to supplement and even, in certain instances, replace our current staple crops.  This statement might sound equal parts boring and esoteric, but allow me to explain.  Most of the crops that provide the caloric basis for human civilization come from annual plants--plants that germinate from seed, grow, produce seed, and die in a year's time.  The most important of these are the cereals from the grass family (e.g., wheat, barley, corn, rice, oats, sorghum), but also vital are the legumes (e.g. soybeans, peanuts, chickpeas, lentils).  They have been the center of the food supply since the beginning of agrarian civilizations millennia ago and still are today, although it might not be as obvious to us, given the great physical and mental distance that typically separates the farm gate from the dinner plate.

Annual plants were so attractive to our ancestors because they reliably produce calorie-rich seeds in relatively dense, uniform stands--often even in their wild form.  Producing seed is the task to which annuals seem to wholeheartedly devote their brief lives.  Indeed, annual cereals and legumes divert a high proportion of their photosynthetic potential to building their progeny, and the proportion is even higher with their domesticated colleagues.

But compared to other plants, our domesticated annuals are weaklings.  They must be coddled and weeded.  For their reception, the ground must be plowed and harrowed, and sometimes it must be cultivated after the crop is planted to destroy competing plants ("weeds").  This process must be repeated for every harvest.  When plow agriculture is extended onto hilly or fragile land, the necessary breaking up of the soil and its protective vegetative mat prepares the ground for erosion from rain and wind.

Furthermore, annual plants must build themselves anew for each harvest.  They may therefore become victims of the climatic peculiarities during the short growing season.  Too much or too little rain at the wrong time can mean a poor yield or total failure.  This is particularly a danger in areas with low or highly seasonal rainfall.

But think of the trees.  They don't require the plow year after year, and yet they can thrive on hilly and rocky land that would be unsuitable for grain.  Because they thrust their permanent root systems deep into the earth, they are able to withstand drought and tolerate flooding better than annual crops.  Moreover, their deep roots can draw on a wider geological profile for nutrients, making them less susceptible to mineral deficiencies.  Unlike the annuals that have to start from scratch every time, trees are ready to produce when producing time arrives.  In other words, they already have a root and branch framework established when adequate warmth, daylight, and moisture presents itself.  A related advantage is that woody plants are intrinsically more effective at capturing light than annual plants.  Certain species can potentially capture three times more solar energy per year than our best domesticated annual grains (maize).  This energy can be used to construct wood, roots, seed, etc.  Think of a Midwestern farmer's field in the spring: while the near-bare fields of maize or soybeans are still sprouting (if conditions are right), the trees and bushes have already leafed out and are busy photosynthesizing.

So why haven't we become a tree cultivating, rather than an annual cultivating, civilization?  Of course, we have domesticated fruit- and nut-bearing trees in almost all climes--apple, walnut, almond, mango, cashew, citrus, the list goes on.  But these tree crops haven't by any means displaced the staple-producing annuals as calorie providers.  Historically, the only trees that have contributed in any major way to world food supplies have been the coconut, oil, and date palms, and possibly the olive.  Most trees are perceived as being too unproductive, slow-growing, or unreliable for serious food production.

Both historical example and present-day research are showing this perception to be false.  Wild trees produce seed crops erratically, but this is because it is ecologically the better course for the tree, not because consistent production is unfeasible.  Experience with breeding fruit and nut trees shows that consistent bearing has a large genetic component.  And some wild stands of trees produce good seed crops with relatively minor fluctuations.  I'll delve into more detail on specific species in future posts, but suffice it to say at this point that trees such as chestnut, oak, locust, and carob provide ample carbohydrate--the "honey" and "corn" trees--while trees such as hazelnut, walnut, and pecan provide ample fat and protein--the "meat and butter" trees.

Recall also that some woody plants can potentially capture three times more solar energy per year than the best domesticated annuals.  Although wild trees devote this energy in an "uneconomical" manner for the farmer,  there is no barrier to allocating this energy differently through systematic breeding or cultural technique (e.g., pruning, pollarding, and coppicing).  There is also no reason why we can't breed trees such as the oak to improve not just the size, but also the palatability, of their nuts and fruits.  After all, the wild almond contains glycoside amygdalin, which gets turned into hydrogen cyanide in response to crushing or chewing.  This unappealing (and deadly) trait was bred out of them thousands of years ago.  

Domesticated, highly productive trees and woody plants can be used to vastly increase our food, fuel, and fiber supplies, while also ameliorating the environment in a number of ways.  Crop-yielding trees offer the best medium for extending agriculture to hills, steep and rocky places, and to lands where rainfall is sparse or irregular.  Even on land amendable to plow or pasture, multi-story agriculture--tree crops above, annual crops or pasture below, and sometimes bushes, shrubs, and vines in between--offers possibilities of a greater total yield than can be had from one-story agriculture.  This multi-tiered system simply captures the solar energy that falls on an area more efficiently.  This form of farming also spreads risks by making the food supply better able to withstand disruptions such as late frost, drought, flood, or pest attack.  And by bringing more species into an area (thus mimicking nature), multi-story agriculture also increases biodiversity.  Whether or not you think it's an intrinsically good thing to do, increasing biodiversity also tends to reduce dependence on toxic pesticides by creating habitat for pests' predators.

Versions of multi-story cropping are, in fact, still practiced as a matter of course in many "traditional" agricultural systems.  In current-day jargon, these systems are described as agroforestry or silvopasture.  And in the heartland of our very own Corn Belt, small-scale research into "woody agriculture"--in which annual crops are entirely replaced by highly productive hazelnut and chestnut hybrids--has been very promising.  In a relatively short time, the "woody ag" folks at Badgersett in Minnesota have bred nut-bearing woody plants to rival and even surpass corn and soy in yield per acre without recourse to any chemical biocides.  I'll discuss other promising examples, past and present, in future posts.

Besides reducing soil erosion, fertilizer runoff, and fossil fuel and irrigation water use, tree crop agriculture can also be a major contributor to addressing global climate change by sequestering massive amounts of atmospheric carbon into woody biomass.  The main problem with conventional afforestation or reforestation as a carbon sequestration scheme is that it can only be applied in areas unsuitable for agriculture, since almost all the world's productive land is needed for food production.  In addition, the destruction of soil organic matter (think of it as sequestered carbon) by conventional plow agriculture, and the production of nitrogen fertilizers to partially compensate for it, are no small CO2 contributors.  With tree crop agriculture writ large, we could have a win-win scenario: more food and fewer greenhouse gases.  Woody plants also hold a lot of promise for biomass energy production, but I'll save that discussion for another time.

In addition to presenting historic and present-day examples of tree crops in action, in future posts I would like to give due credit to some of the pioneers in the (for lack of a better term) tree crop movement.  It turns out that it's decades old.  I'd also like to discuss why woody plant agriculture has failed to become mainstream, despite all its apparent advantages.  My intuition is that it has something to do with money, bureaucracy, and misplaced good intentions.  But then again, most absurdities do.

Grass, the forgiveness of nature

I was intending to write a few posts on the vastly under-appreciated potential of "woody agriculture" (basically, farming with domesticated trees and shrubs) when I ran across a beautiful homage to grass by John James Ingalls, a Kansas Senator from 1873 to 1891.  In the interest of giving balanced attention to all the plants that provide us with a livelihood, I'll quote the passage at length.  

I've had grass on the mind lately anyway.  And no, I don't mean "grass" as hippie argot would have it, but the true grasses--the species that belong to the Poaceae, not the Cannabaceae, family.  With May now upon us, my mind drifts to memories of late spring in Wisconsin, with its long days, rain showers, and frenetic green grass growth.  By contrast, many of the wild grasses here in central California, unless they enjoy the shady protection of an oak tree, have already pretty much wound things up for the year.  Resigning to the reality of the warm and rainless months ahead, they have set seed and are obligingly on their way to dormancy.  While most of the Midwestern grasses were patiently hibernating through the below-freezing temperatures and snowdrifts, those here were taking advantage of the rainfall and cool temperatures of the winter.  From a good vantage point, one can now see the result of several months' growth.  The shimmering yellows and pale greens of the mature grass fields convey a subtle but stunning kind of beauty that I love about May here--but things will only get drier and deader until the winter rains.  So this is the time of year when I think of grasses going, as it were, in two different directions in the two different places that I consider "home."

Without any further ado, an excerpt from Mr. Ingalls' oft-quoted 1872 article, "Bluegrass": 

Next in importance to the divine profusion of water, light, and air, those great physical facts which render existence possible, may be reckoned the universal beneficence of grass.  Exaggerated by tropical heats and vapors to the gigantic cane congested with its saccharine secretion, or dwarfed by polar rigors to the fibrous hair of northern solitudes, embracing between these extremes the maize with its resolute pennons, the rice plant of the southern swamps, the wheat, rye, barley, oats, and other cereals, no less than the humbler verdure of hillside, pasture, and prairie in the temperate zone, grass is the most widely distributed of all vegetable beings, and is at once the type of our life and the emblem of our mortality.  Lying in the sunshine among the buttercups and dandelions of May, scarcely higher in intelligence than the minute tenants of that mimic wilderness, our earliest recollections are of grass; and when the fitful fever is ended, and the foolish wrangle of the market and forum is closed, grass heals over the scar which our descent into the bosom of the earth has made, and the carpet of the infant becomes the blanket of the dead.

As he reflected upon the brevity of human life, grass has been the favorite symbol of the moralist, the chosen theme of the philosopher.  "All flesh is grass," said the prophet; "My days are as the grass," sighed the troubled patriarch; and the pensive Nebuchadnezar, in his penitential mood, exceeded even these, and, as the sacred historian informs us, did eat grass like an ox.

Grass is the forgiveness of nature--her constant benediction.  Fields trampled with battle, saturated with blood, torn with the ruts of cannon, grow green again with grass, and carnage is forgotten.  Streets abandoned by traffic become grass-grown like rural lanes, and are obliterated.  Forests decay, harvest perish, flowers vanish, but grass is immortal.  Beleaguered by the sullen hosts of winter, it withdraws into the impregnable fortress of its subterranean vitality, and emerges upon the first solicitation of spring.  Sown by the winds, by wandering birds, propagated by the subtle horticulture of the elements which are its ministers and servants, it softens the rude outlines of the world.  Its tenacious fibres hold the earth in its place, and prevent its soluble components from washing into the wasting sea.  It invades the solitude of the deserts, climbs the inaccessible slopes and forbidding pinnacles of mountains, modifies climates, and determines the history, character, and destiny of nations.  Unobtrusive and patient, it has immortal vigor and aggression.  Banished from the thoroughfare and the field, it bides its time to return, and when vigilance is relaxed, or the dynasty has perished, it silently resumes the throne from which it has been expelled, but which it never abdicates.  It bears no blazonry or bloom to charm the senses with fragrance or splendor, but its homely hue is more enchanting than the lily or the rose.  It yields no fruit in earth and air, and yet should its harvest fail for a single year, famine would depopulate the world.

I'll try to get back to trees and woody agriculture in future posts, although I have a few items of note regarding some new developments in the "grass farming" scene.  And since I'm talking about grass, I might as well mention that the photograph at the masthead of this blog is of ripening heads of triticale (a wheat-rye hybrid) from my backyard garden.  It's delicious.

Traffic, transit, and transport

Allow me to make two closely related points.  The first is more general, and the second one that follows from it is more specific.  

First, the more general one.  We've gotten to the absurd point where the simple act of moving our bodies around has become a major consumer of fossil fuels and contributor to greenhouse gas emissions in the United States (to say nothing of our petro-shenanigans in the Middle East).  For reasons too complicated to recite here, it was decided several decades ago that we should ensconce ourselves in several hundred pounds of metal, glass, and rubber and rely on petroleum-burning motors to move said inert poundage and ourselves around at high speeds (at least ideally, like in the commercials). Aside from minor additions such as seat belts and cup holders, this is still the basic configuration for how most people in this country go to and from work, school, errands, church, and weekend getaways.

There was a moment over thirty years ago when this peculiar way of moving ourselves around came into question, at least in some quarters.  Back in the 1970s, in the midst of the Arab oil embargo and the "energy crisis" that ensued, a lot of new ideas were being proposed: not just cars with higher gas mileage, but solar panels, better insulation, geodesic dome houses.  Some of these ideas were acted upon, many were not.  When oil got risibly cheap again in the 1980s and 1990s, most Americans went back to driving everywhere (actually more than before) in gas-guzzling cars.  

But in the midst of the "energy crisis" of the 1970s, a public intellectual, Ivan Illich, came at it from a singularly novel perspective.  The following is an extended passage from Illich's Energy and Equity (1974):

The discussion of how energy is used to move people requires a formal distinction between transport and transit as the two components of traffic.  By traffic I mean any movement of people from one place to another when they are outside of their homes. By transit I mean those movements that put human metabolic energy to use, and by transport that mode of movement that relies on other sources of energy....

The product of the transportation industry is the habitual passenger.  He has been boosted out of the world in which people still move on their own, and he has lost the sense that he stands at the center of his world.  The habitual passenger is conscious of the exasperating time scarcity that results from daily recourse to cars, trains, buses, subways, and elevators that force him to cover an average of twenty miles a day, frequently criss-crossing his path within a radius of less than five miles.  He has been lifted off his feet... The habitual passenger is caught at the wrong end of growing inequality, time scarcity, and personal impotence, but he can see no way out of this bind except to demand more of the same: more traffic by transport.  He stands in wait for technical changes in the design of vehicles, roads, and schedules; or else he expects a revolution to produce mass rapid transport under public control....

The habitual passenger cannot grasp the folly of traffic based overwhelmingly on transport... He has lost the power to conceive of himself outside the passenger role.  Addicted to being carried along, he has lost control over the physical, social, and psychic powers that reside in man's feet.  The passenger has come to identify territory with the untouchable landscape through which he is rushed.  He has become impotent to establish his domain, mark it with his imprint, and assert his sovereignty over it.

 

I bring up the distinction Illich drew between transit and transport as a way to preface my second, more specific point: an alternative transport movement going on right here in sunny Santa Cruz.  The Citizens for Personal Rapid Transit, or cPRT, are pushing for a solar-powered, computerized, semi-personal moving pod system.  I have heard the PRT advocates speak at several eco-shindigs around town, and I was impressed by the vigor with which they pursued their cause.  As far as I'm concerned, almost anything is better than the car-centered system we have now, so I applaud their efforts heartily.  But I fear they are symptomatic of a much larger and deeply held assumption: habitual passengerhood.  If unchallenged, it will hamstring any sane approach to traffic and urban design.  Should we be spending the limited resources we have on perpetuating our dependence on motorized transport, or should we prioritize human-powered transit? 

Much of the discussion about "green" alternatives to our current car dependence overlooks an obvious point: we can build our towns and cities around muscle-powered traffic.  Humans had been doing it for millennia before cars came along.  Actually, there are two obvious points: many of these towns and cities are perfectly nice places to live.  Indeed, tourists burn ungodly quanta of fossil fuels flying across the planet simply to photograph them and try out the local cuisine.  But there's no secret to their success: they were built at the human scale.  Everything else--the pleasant public squares, small shops, walkable neighborhoods, public art, neat truck farms and countryside minutes from downtown--followed from the need to build a living arrangement around the limited reach of the human body.  

Rather than have tourists ruin the "authentic feel" of places like Venice, Siena, and Salzburg by virtue of their sheer crushing mass, why not allow our own native urban spaces to follow the logic of the human scale?  Then perhaps people wouldn't have such a pressing desire to escape from the ugliness and hectic pace in their own little corner of the world.  If our towns and cities became places to dwell in, and not just to move through, then perhaps people would start seriously investing in comely urban amenities rather than, say, yet another trip to the big city or multimillion-dollar bond measure to expand the highway system.  Before you know it, we would have hundreds of charming towns and cities to rival Venice, Siena, and Salzburg.  Most of our population could actually be living in them!  

Don't get me wrong: there's clearly an important place for motorized modes of transport.  Rail, automobiles, busses, trams, etc. all have their place in a civilized mode of living.  This would especially be the case for farming and bulk goods transport, long-distance travelers, and the ill or infirm.  Now that we know about these technologies, we should use them.  I see no reason from an environmental perspective why we can't employ them, where appropriate, for the foreseeable future.  But their place has to be a peripheral one in the overall urban scheme.  Even if we were to somehow devise an ingenious carbon-neutral "green" replacement for our fossil-fueled transportation system, it wouldn't address the basic fact that desirable urban spaces require a certain density of activity that is best and most cheaply attained by building around the limits of the pedestrian's foot and the bicycle's pedal.  We should see climate change and Peak Oil as yet more reasons among many for reshaping our built environment around the time-tested principles of the human scale, not for trying out the latest techno-utopian phantasma that would keep us imprisoned in a web of motorized transport. 

I'll close with a relevant quote from Leopold Kohr's The Breakdown of Nations (1957!): 

Cars seem thus to have brought us less satisfaction than a good old steed or pair of sturdy shoes brought our forefathers.  However, one may say, cars and other highly efficient means of modern transportation such as tubes or bus services are no longer a luxury to satisfy our travel wants.  They have become a necessity to satisfy our basic needs.  That is quite true.  But since when is the creation of new necessities a sign of progress?

Why am I doing this? A long-ish apologia

"Recently... most Euroamericans have been happily paying no attention to the way their world works even though they have theoretical access to vastly greater quantities of information, a word I use here as a term of contempt.  Information has been able to mislead us because we did not put the bits together properly in the form of shared historical knowledge.  That has been our fault.  Instead of rethinking our possible role on the planet, instead of qualifying or revising our anthropocentric habits, we have shamelessly used the decline of theology relative to science as an excuse to elevate our own importance further.  Logically we should have replaced theology with ecology, before enlarging the parameters of our behavior by the heavy use of fossil fuels.  We have learned the ecology just in time, but we must act immediately to curb ourselves.  In order to avoid similar future folly, we must review more closely how we came to be so careless, even while we deal with the emergency."  --Colin Duncan, "The Practical Equivalent of War?", December 2007

To anyone who is paying attention, things are currently going really badly.  Of the many unintended outputs of industrial activity, global climate change is making acid rain and mercury contamination utterly quaint by comparison.  And what were only a few years ago pessimistic estimates about the pace and impact of climate change are turning out to have been quite conservative.  On the input side, it looks like we're in the midst of Peak Oil, or soon will be.  Stagnating petroleum supplies amidst inexorably rising demand is, in all likelihood, one of the main factors underpinning our current economic recession.  Peak Oil might be a blessing in disguise for climate change, but it could also lead in the short- and medium-term to a massive increase in the use of coal, as well as the destruction of our remaining intact ecosystems as the search for biomass becomes more desperate.  Nor does it take a stretch of the imagination to see that whatever is left of decent statesmanship could be thrown out the window in an atmosphere of relative scarcity  and chronic economic depression.  Electorates that expect two cars in every garage can be easy to terrify.

I won't belabor the point.  What is clear, overall, is that we need to stop extracting so much dead carbon fuel from its underground storage areas and burning it.  But that leaves the question of what we're supposed to do instead, and what we can do to minimize the impact of our past transgressions.

Our only way forward, as I see it, is to embrace a new agrarianism.  We need to make ourselves right with the land.  Stated more prosaically: No sustainable future can be built unless the centrality of the soil and vegetation to humankind is properly recognized.  This was the case before global climate change and Peak Oil came on the scene; in fact, these recent phenomena reinforce my point.  All the recent monetary and emotional investment in "green" technologies such as hybrid cars and solar panels is certainly a good thing, and we need more of it.  But I think it's pure fantasy to see them as more than window-dressing on a fundamentally soil-based economy.  We've lived 99.9% of our existence as a species without fossil fuels, but we've always depended on soil and plants.  We need to jettison the idea, still pervasive even among many "progressives," that we can simply replace our current arrangement with a roughly similar "green" version, Caribbean vacations and all.  This set of expectations is based on many of the same assumptions about technology and science that got us into our current predicament in the first place.

But to be clear, I'm not arguing that we need to return to living like hunter-gatherers or peasants, or even that the majority of the population needs to be rural.  There have been plenty of primitivists and rural romantics who have made this argument, and even acted on it.  Needless to say, such a line of reasoning betrays a naivety regarding the darker aspects of radical self-sufficiency.  On the other hand, though, one of the most damaging and widely held assumptions of the past century or so is that advancements like democracy and sexual equality require masses of people moiling away in factories and office complexes, daily consuming their weight in finite resources.  Going back to relying on living cycles for most of our energy and material does not also mean that we will have to lead half-starved and threadbare lives.  Democracy and the more general set of institutions and practices we call "civilization" require cities, the division of labor, and people with free time, but there is a lot of room for variation within those requirements.  Looking back from the beginning of the twenty-first century, we can see that most of the variations we have tried out, including our more recent flirtation with fossil fuels, have been failures.  

Fortunately, an accumulating mass of evidence from ecology and environmental history has been improving our understanding of life on this planet.  All this evidence should give us grounds for optimism that we can devise purely "organic" methods of farming for food, fiber, and building materials that are massively productive and indefinitely sustainable.  Only by recovering and refining past agricultures, horticultures, arboricultures, aquacultures, etc. can we eventually become certain that humankind will someday experience levels of meaningful abundance and low workloads for generations to come, without fouling our nests.  In other words, we're sunk unless we in the "developed" world can figure out how to rebuild our agricultures and make them the basis of our economic activity.  A major step is simply getting more people interested in this rebuilding process, and, beyond that, getting more people working with the land directly, part-time or full.  The main objective of this blog is to raise awareness of the many historical and present-day examples of interacting with living nature in way that is sustainable, or even beneficial.  I am constantly surprised and delighted by new discoveries in this area, and I thought others would like to know about them.  

I'm even more hopeful about what might be possible in the near future.  Learning to live intimately with carbon in living tissues will enable us not only to wean ourselves from dependence on dead sources of carbon, but there could also be a number of other beneficial knock-on effects.  In many ways, the fossil-fueled industrial mode of living that we were born into is needlessly complex, inhumane, and unhealthy.  Thoughtful people have been making arguments to this effect for a long time--since the beginning of industrial civilization a couple centuries ago, really.  So an ancillary purpose of this blog is to dig up who I think are the most perceptive of these people, many of whom are now undeservedly obscure.  Even though a number of them didn't take an explicitly "environmentalist" angle against our energy-drunk and speed-stunned society, their viewpoints can only reinforce it.

That's the general theme of this blog.  Mostly it's about thinking through how we can rearrange our priorities so that the soil and living green things are given their proper due by our entire culture, not just hippies.   I'll try to stick to this theme in subsequent entries, even when I'm commenting on, say, urban design, alternative currencies, or the mess that academia is in.  There will probably be a preponderance of material on food and nutrition, since that's my current area of focus.  Suffice it to say at this point that I find the "industrial" mentality to have invaded far too deeply into our thinking about health and sickness, which is great news given that we have to drastically curtail industrial activity to keep the planet in a condition amenable to civilized living.  And I might not be able to keep myself from posting photos of my garden or trivial reflections on the wonderfully temperate Mediterranean environment I currently inhabit.