permaculture

[Toby Hemenway <toby@patternliteracy.com>]

On Aug 17, 2012, at 4:19 PM, John D'hondt wrote:

> 
> What is the draught doing in your calculations Tony.

I'm glad you asked--it makes my point! The USDA harvest projections show how 
complex and unpredictable the food systems are. Harvests of all grains are 
down 12-15% in the US--which means the worst harvest in 8-10 years; far less 
of a catastrophe than one might think, given that the drought is the worst in 
56 years. But get ready for this: The projections are for greater total 
stocks of corn than last year by 10% or more, because the decline in the 
global economy means less exported corn, less being made into ethanol, and, 
for reasons I haven't learned, we are importing more this year. 
http://www.agweb.com/blog/Farmland_Forecast_148/

This--more food, not less--shows how unsuited linear thinking is (like, less 
oil means less food; bad weather means less food, and so on) in a complex 
adaptive system like food, the economy, and most of everything else we live 
in. That's why I'm not a doomer. Systems adapt in utterly unpredictable ways, 
and they often adapt well.

Much of the reason we default to "it's gonna get real bad," besides being 
hard-wired for the scarcity thinking that is habitual, is that the systems we 
depend on are more complex that we can grasp without a lot of study, both of 
the system and of systems thinking in general. That's hard work, and it's 
much easier to think "It can't possibly hang together, it's so complex," when 
in fact it is the complexity that allows it to hang together, adapt, and 
survive even extremely severe shocks. And it's why "grow all your own food" 
is the least resilient, least adaptive response to food issues: it's totally 
un-networked, vulnerable, and simple in the worst sense of the word. That 
kind of self-reliance is not a permaculture principle; it's a default 
scarcity response and if I can achieve one (more) thing in life, it would be 
to root that out.

Toby
http://patternliteracy.com