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.