Healthy soil and sustainable growing

["Tradingpost" <tradingpost@gilanet.com>]

This entire lecture can be found at
http://www.feasta.org/documents/review2/fleming.htm

paul tradingpost@gilanet.com
http://medicinehill.net
NM
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The Lean Economy: A Vision of Civility for a World in Trouble
DAVID FLEMING, The Annual Feasta Lecture

excerpts:

The coming oil shock is not the only reason why the prospects for the
global market economy and for civilisation as a whole look poor. A complex
system, such as a car or a human body, tends at the end of its life to fail
in many different ways at about the same time. A second sign of systems
failure is climate change. Thirdly, there is the complex and still
poorly-understood issue of how a mature market economy can, even under
ideal conditions, sustain the perpetual economic growth which is an
essential condition for its stability: along with Richard Douthwaite and
others I argue that it simply cannot do so. Fourthly, there is the
increasingly intense phenomenon of disengagement ­ a failure of
participation, consent, shared values, social cohesion ­ in short, a
failure of social capital which ultimately matures into insurgency, both
from dissidents on the outside of modern society and from within it. The
system is failing in many other ways: soil fertility, water, hormone
disruptors, the collapse of fisheries ­ but that is enough for now.

If we put all these together, then we find ourselves looking at the climax
of the market economy, followed by its comprehensive failure, very high
unemployment and an atrophy of government revenues, leading towards what
could be called hyperunemployment - that is, unemployment so high that
government cannot fund subsistence payments and pensions. Unemployment on
this scale means no income. No income means no food. No food means the
collapse of urban populations on the scale experienced by former civic
societies ­ the Romans and some two dozen other accomplished
civilisations ­ in the closing phase of their life-cycles. I hope I am
wrong or, rather, that it doesn't come to this. But it does seem obvious to
me that the opportunity is rapidly passing in which it will be possible to
avoid the high levels of mortality that have been associated with the
collapse of other civic societies.
.........
After the failure of the market economy, households will lack jobs, they
will lack state handouts; above all, they will lack primary goods - food,
water, energy and materials. Those are the things that really matter; they
provide the basis for coping with life - and they are the things that urban
populations cannot easily provide for themselves. Primaries will fall
within the range of assets open to households if and only if there is a
revolution in their effectiveness as producers. Households will need to
become as competent in the future as industry is now; they will need to use
many of industry's technologies and practices. The name of this revolution
is "the new domestication".
.....
All civilisations crash. In the end, the political economy flips into a
quite different, lightweight, decentralised order requiring a drastically
reduced quantity of goods and services, minimal transport and much less
specialisation. In response, people and localities start to provide most of
what they need for themselves. This is the inevitable sequel to the closing
stages of a civic society.

In the past, those closing stages have led to a collapse into dark ages,
with the population, as the Venerable Bede put it, being "cut down, like
ripe corn". I would argue that the sooner we start to build distributed,
decentralised, broadly competent local economies, the more realistic they
become: the less the pain; the less the grief; the greater the prospects of
evolution beyond the market economy - making something of what we have
inherited, and building on it.
........
 Rethinking land-use: The market economy's pattern of "capture and
concentration" with large centres linked by routine transport is
inappropriate for the stabilised Lean Economy of the future, which will
require a more sophisticated, complex organisation.
.........
Closed systems. It is here that the solution lies. And closed systems will
take the form of local organisation, local economies. There will be no
alternative. They will not be able to buy-in their needs, to import their
way out of trouble. Local lean economies will not simply be a good idea;
they will be the only option. And they will be organised on principles of
lean thinking.

... A closed system means no material imports, no material waste, and
dependence on solar energy. Well, you cannot get completely closed systems
in human affairs, except on the scale of the planet as a whole, but, on a
local scale, you can get very much closer than we are at present.

A closed system in the case of food requires fertility to be retained
locally - that is, not only nitrogen, phosphates and potash - but the
micronutrients too. If conserved as capital, composted and used again and
again, fertility - including human waste - can be more than simply
sustained; it can be built up towards the extraordinarily high local yields
achieved by such virtuosos of food production as Alan Chadwick and John
Jeavons.
...........
But we have to start from where we are. We have to rebuild a culture, a
multiple culture, making a celebratory virtue out of diversity. And we need
to have an idea of the job that a strong culture has to do. You see, there
is a great deal more to local economies than renewable energy and local
currencies; material need is not, and never has been, a sufficient
incentive for wholehearted cooperation in anything. What we are talking
about here, what we are looking for, is a society which is capable of
lasting for a very long time, picking up from the defunct market economy,
containing and channelling ambitions, providing a social and cognitive
setting for the greatest minds, being fun, tolerating dissidence, moving
beyond sustainable development and environmental policy, and joining
together to build a political economy for a new era. What local economies
have to achieve in the future is survival, permanence and civility.
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David Fleming studied history at Oxford (1963), business management at
Cranfield (1968) and economics at Birkbeck College, London, completing a
PhD in 1988. After working in industry he became an independent consultant.
He was elected to the Council of the Ecology (Green) Party in 1977 and
served as economics spokesman and press secretary; the party office was his
flat in Hampstead. He later worked on the Council of the Soil Association,
which he chaired 1988-91. He now works full time as a writer and lecturer
on the environmental and social issues which can be expected to have a
major impact in the new century. He has recently completed two books: The
Lean Economy: A Vision of Civility for a World in Trouble, and Lean Logic:
A Dictionary for Our Time, which are due to be published shortly.