permaculture

[David Travis <djtravis@hotmail.com>]

> From: Toby Hemenway 
> Subject: Re: [permaculture] The Five Stages of Financial Collapse
> To: permaculture 
>
> ... But centralized control structures are notoriously poor at dealing with 
> rapid change (e.g. FEMA and Katrina), and I think the USSR merely shows how 
>   
> difficult it is for an industrial state to collapse fully.

This is a rather ironic interpretation of Katrina, given that the initial 
response to the disaster was to "allow" (if they could afford it...) families 
to purchase their own options for evacuation "on the market", and that 
subsequent disaster relief was both decentralized (with multiple state and 
federal agencies both claiming and disavowing responsibility for multiple 
relief responsibilities)  and lacked a fixed structure. So claiming that 
Katrina is a case where centralized planning and structure existed but failed 
doesn't seem like a very accurate description of what happened, since the 
main criticism seems not to be so much that these didn't work, but that they 
simply existed as haphazard afterthoughts if they existed at all. If 
anything, Katrina is a case where a lack of coordinated centralized planning, 
a blind faith in consumer "freedom" and markets,  paired with a lack of 
action on the part of state and non-state agencies, lead to a rather 
devastating and embarrassing outcome. 

I'd also like to note that this is a classic neo-conservative strategy coming 
from the unlikely and well-intentioned pen of Toby Hemenway: using 
(well-founded...) public animosity and distrust of the government as a way of 
defending (in the case of conservatives) deregulation and corporatism. I know 
this isn't what Toby has in mind, but we simply can't exchange the failures 
of one system as evidence for the success of an alternative, especially when 
this "alternative" has a history that's as wasteful and bloody as any 
government could hope to be.

> A far better system to deal with rapid change than a centralized one is a 
> highly distributed network of independent agents, like our economy.

This is interesting, considering that "our economy" has virtually destroyed 
our planet, has exterminated and enslaved entire cultures, and has managed to 
become one of the most inefficient, self-destructive, and inhumane resource 
allocation and management systems ever devised. I would be genuinely 
interested to hear why anyone would consider it to be a good candidate for 
dealing with rapid change.

> Western economies are like ecosystems and thus more resilient to chaos than 
> centralized ones. 

I'd be very, very cautious of leaping head-first into analogies like these. 
An ecosystem might "adapt" to stress with "positive" things, such as 
symbiosis, but it may also respond with increased incidents of epidemic 
disease, population decline, and even species loss. These changes in an 
ecosystem might allow for the net preservation of biodiversity over the long 
run, but it does so in a way that involves adaptations which, if translated 
into actions within a human society, would be morally abhorrent. Allowing the 
old, young, and sick to be culled by resource depletion, or looking upon 
epidemic disease as a positive "adaptation", takes the intuition that "mother 
nature knows best" to a level that is frightening and sociopathic. An economy 
or political structure might adapt and survive, but this tells us absolutely 
nothing about the quality of its treatment of human beings or the Earth.

In fact, I think America went through a period where the government was 
small, our economy was "free", and a "naturalistic" philosophy of society and 
economics was all the rage. That philosophy was called social Darwinism, and 
that time period saw massive class disparity, worker exploitation, 
institutionalized racism, runaway pollution, widespread human rights abuses, 
and the final massacres of the First Nations. This America might have been 
very "resilient" and "adaptive", but it's no place I would want to live.


- David Travis
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