Size of a system as a factor.
I’m writing this blog post from my friend’s farm out in Deadwood, Oregon, which, in case you were wondering, is in the middle of nowhere. The property is completely secluded, and runs off of its own solar electricity. Water is pumped from a well, and food comes from the gardens and animals on the farm. There is only a single, one-lane road that comes out here, and many of the other conventions of society are completely absent from the area. As a result, many of the issues faced by society are also absent. There is no anonymity, even between the neighbors which are further away than regular neighbors. Theft doesn’t happen, violence doesn’t make sense, and greed is obsolete. To me, it seems idyllic that people can live this way. But it isn’t so much the specific things that they do in order to be sustainable, but rather the small scale on which they operate that makes the farm so great.
This got me to thinking about how a system can operate just fine to a certain degree but when the scale of the system is increased greatly, it no longer operates efficiently. I then thought about how we create a whole slew of problems by operating with a national identity that is some 300 million people large as opposed to a realistic identity that reflects one’s current role in their lives. It’s really quite a simple concept, and we don’t even need to think about something as profound as society in order to realize it. Take agriculture, for example. If you’re growing tomatoes for you and your family, you probably will just grow them in soil as opposed to having a whole hydroponic system for a few plants. However, if you were growing tomatoes commercially, it would be a massive chore to switch out the thousands of pounds of soil that need to be moved. Also, it would take a great deal of land and would have to be grown outdoors, which limits the crop to its natural season. Therefore, one would opt to grow the tomatoes hydroponically on an industrial scale, as most places do. Even so, there are a lot of issues that come with commercial farming, and there is a significant loss of food quality and nutrient density when growing hydroponically. So, in short, it would be better if everyone grew their own tomatoes using the system that produces high quality food in a practical, low-cost, low-maintenance fashion.
In the same vein, it would be better if we replaced some of our massive systems that we depend on (grocery stores, gas stations, electricity, plumbing, etc.) with smaller, more sustainable systems. This will result in a higher level of security since there cannot be a central failure of the farming system if the farming system is divided across everyone’s individual gardens and farms.
Sounds like a fantastic place to be, J.J. Have you seen the documentary 'No Impact Man'?
ReplyDeleteMy comment below is more about a continuation of the thread on Daniel Quinn than anything else, though it is connected to your point here about agriculture and also to GG&S (hm.. everything seems to be connected...)
I looked up a little about Quinn, and I'm looking forward to reading Ishmael especially, but I found this clip of an interview of him (posted by the producers of the longer movie it comes from), and in it he talks about the reinforcing feedback loop of overpopulation and food production (though he doesn't call it that exactly).
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pPRJQpWhE0o
He makes the claim that if we just stopped growing so much food (and exporting it), we wouldn't have so many people. He's right of course. A balancing loop would kick in where people would not be able to survive past a certain point without enough food.
But of course our systems are so complex - who could realistically propose that we just stop making 'too much' food? Can we reverse globalization and decide that only those who can locally sustain food (such as J.J.'s friend) on their own for their own population should be allowed to live? Or do we encourage/help third world countries to grow their own food with their own technology, in which case we just have the same environmental limit problems we have now anyway, only more? He may have good answers to these questions - I don't know yet. But it really made me think about the deeply ethical and emotional dilemmas tied up with limits and decisions around balancing feedback loops.
I also noted that Quinn said he assumed humans had been farming for 'hundreds of thousands of years'. Now we know it's only 8500 years, and I'm not so sure that destruction is linked to only a 'privatized' version of agriculture, as Quinn implies.
At this point in time only a very small population of the world could exist if everyone where to live sustainably, and although it's great for those who have the means to do so, there are still millions of people who are just struggling to feed themselves and their families. Quinn, in a rather Machiavellian manner, recommends that we just stop feeding others and allow it to work it's self out that way, but I don't see that as a solution to the problem. I see that as a too head-on way of trying to alter a system that would lead to the same problem occurring in a different way, much like the Romanian problem of low birth rates. It's not that people are not having babies because their are too many contraceptives, it's because they don't have the means of supporting large families. And it is not a problem of merely having too many people, it is a problem that many people are still struggling to survive. We need to fix the problem of unsustainable farming and other business, but we need to go about it by fixing the problems that create the need for that, not just try to lessen the demand.
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