The Diagonal Economy 6: Small Worlds Theory

Small Worlds theory is one method of quantifying and optimizing networks, and is often applied to the optimization of networks in business and economics.  Most people are familiar with the theory because it has produced, among other things, the “hub-and-spoke” design for airline routes.  While small worlds theory has broad applicability in business and social networks, it tends to ignore many factors that influence the actual effectiveness and efficiency of coordination and communication in human networks.  My intent with this post is to propose a theoretical structure for the Diagonal Economy that builds on the small worlds theory of network optimization, but that accounts for the issue of hierarchy to create a flat, non-hierarchal network structure that will facilitate coordination and communication in parallel to our present economic system.

Without regard for hierarchy or span of control, small worlds theory optimizes the shortest path length (e.g. for airlines flights) by heavy reliance on hubs to minimize connections.  However, this theory’s reliance solely on path length optimization fails to account for the information processing burden created at these hubs (e.g. span of control, SNAFU, etc.) nor does it account for the side effects of this necessarily hierarchal structure.  For example, the hub-and-spoke small worlds systems suggested by Watt and Strogatz, among other current small worlds theorists, create excessive dependencies on the hubs in these models.  This creates a network that is neither topologically flat (there are significant dependencies of most nodes on the hub), nor resilient (a breakdown of a hub causes chaos). 

Additionally, the hub-and-spoke models created in traditional small worlds optimization is not compatible with the span of control capability of human nodes in those networks.  Span of control is, essentially, the number of other humans that one human can effectively manage in a hierarchy—a number which tends to settle at about 5.  Where humans are a component of the networks optimized through traditional hub-and-spoke small worlds systems, the information processing burden at the hubs is exacerbated because multiple layers of human hierarchy are required to manage the activities of the hub.

While the math of the standard hub-and-spoke small worlds optimization process is complex (see, e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watts_and_Strogatz_model), my intuition is that an effort to balance minimization of path length and minimization of information processing burden of hierarchy (and other more subjective side effects of hierarchal structure) will result in a very different optimal network structure than that suggested by the Watts and Strogatz model, and one that will facilitate far superior information processing by any real world process running on such a network. Basically, I’m suggesting that, because the hub-and-spoke model fails to account for the issues of hierarchy (and the associated issue of span of control), it fails to actually optimize the network for human reality (instead forcing upon us a system that squeezes humans into a machine role).  Below, I propose an alternative structure that I think is broadly applicable and that will allow for more efficient coordination and communication in human structures precisely because it is non-hierarchal.

First, one factor that must be considered in formulating this alternative structure is that, while optimization of a network in some theoretical set it may permissible to ignore physical geography, in the Diagonal Economy the demands of production tied to geography (e.g. food, water, energy, family) demand at least some degree of local clustering (as, I think, does our psychology to some degree due to our development in such an environment).

Next, it is necessary when developing such a theory to recognize that, when humans comprise the nodes in such a system, there is a limit to the number of effective connections in which each node can participate (and to avoid span of control issues popping up even in non-hierarchal systems).  The concept in anthropology known as Dunbar’s Number suggests that this number for humans is approximately 150.  The jury is out on whether new technologies (e.g. social networking software) or psychological developments (such as autism – see “Create Your Own Economy” by Tyler Cowen) may be changing that, but for now Dunbar’s Number seems to provide a reasonable guide. 

Next, I think that the effectiveness of people in any system improves when those people are not being squeezed into the role of a cog in a giant hierarchy, but instead are working in a self-directed, self-motivated capacity with peers.  Human creativity, passion, drive, and so many other subjective qualities seem to fare better when self-actualized, rather than acting as an, essentially, an insect.

Finally, variable loyalty or strength of connection is simply a reality in any human-based network, and is something that conventional small-worlds theory ignores.  Even within the 150 links supported by Dunbar’s Number, some will be far stronger than others.  One factor supporting this is the shared connectivity between links (e.g. A links to B and C, but B and C are also linked).  Another factor is geographic proximity, though there are certainly proxies in cyberspace (e.g. shared language).

With all of these factors taken in to account, my theory of an optimal flat network is most simply described from the perspective of a single node:  a number of close, strong, and generally mutually shared links, and a diverse array of medium and distant, weak or strong links.  Here is a simple graphic illustrating this concept:

However, it is how these sets are combined that is critical—and that I have previously stated incorrectly (at least per my current theory).  In the past, I suggested that these sets combine as follows:

The structure portrayed in the above graphic portrays more of a lattice structure, and suggests a pattern of interconnectivity that is too uniform to support either flat network optimization (the distant connections are too uniform and too uniformly close) or to support emergence (which, from observation, only seems to exist in situations with very dense, diverse, and variably distant sets of weak connections).

I’ve hinted at the solution in the past:

But in reality this graphic still relies far too heavily on regular and close connections.  The above graphic implies (incorrectly) that these distant and irregular connections (as shown by the bold black lines in the graphic above) are minor parts of the network and only utilized by occasional nodes--in fact, they are the core of the network and are just as critical as the close connections depicted above.  Additionally, the medium-close connections (as shown by the repeated pattern of four connections to nearby nodes) are excessively standardized.  An optimal configuration would show a far more random and variable set of medium and distant/weak connections.

Here's an example:

Compare that to the same nodes networked in a traditional hub-and-spoke system:

Notice that, in the hub-and-spoke system, one node in each close cluster is in control--it's the "hub," and communication between subordinate nodes through these hubs creates dependency.  While the hub-and-spoke system provides a minimally shorter path in many cases, my theory is that the information processing burden imposed at the hubs, combined with the lack of self-sufficiency and resiliency, makes the hub-and-spoke model inferior to the "rhizome" model of more egalitarian connections.

One clear weakness in this model is that it cannot be objectively and mathematically quantified in the manner of the Watts and Strogatz model.  First, the desire to optimize both path length and multiple human factors simultaneously is antithetical to mathematical analysis (you can only optimize for one thing).  When there are multiple factors to be balanced, there are probably many different effective structures, and the potential for “local peaks” presents a significant challenge (where slight tweaking of a variable degrades the performance of the model, thereby preventing further exploration that would, eventually, identify a superior structure).  There is also the fundamental challenge of conducting controlled experiments or simulations to evaluate highly complex human structures.  Therefore, this theory is necessarily based on an intuitive application of these factors and anecdotal evidence.  As with the development of all human systems, I think optimization of flat human networks, a cornerstone of the Diagonal Economy, is best achieved through the development and fine-tuning of a series of (rough) guiding principles:

1.  (Strong):  Approximately 1/3 geographically (or otherwise) close and strong/loyal connections that share significant interconnectivity among each other.

2.  (Weak):  Approximately 2/3 geographically (or otherwise) distant connections, of variable strength/loyalty that are largely not shared by the above group.

3.  (Self-Aware):  A self-awareness of these principles in the creation and maintenance of connections

4.  (Shared Principles):  Particularly within the context of creating a “diagonal” network that overlaps but exists out of phase with a “large world,” a criteria in creating new connections should also be whether that connection understands and applies this theory in its own connections (which can be accomplished through education and facilitation or discrimination).

That’s pretty simple, but I think largely ignored and potentially revolutionary when applied.  Ultimately, if the Diagonal Economy can develop and latch-on to a superior structure for coordination and communication, it will quickly spread as a means for individuals to maintain and improve quality of life through increased self-sufficiency and resilience despite the troubles besetting hierarchy.

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The Blurry (Non-Cartesian) Threat: Maj. Hasan and the Sensory System of the State

One of my favorite books is "Seeing like a State" by James C. Scott.  It chronicles the capabilities, limitations, and propensities of the sensory apparatus of the state.  This, alone, is a fascinating concept, but now it provides a fascinating window into the failure of the Nation-State system to understand what is really happening with a situation like the recent Fort Hood shootings by (allegedly) U.S. Army Major Nidal Hasan.

Our societal sensory system likes to categorize things--probably because it's an aggregation of human sensory systems that function similarly, and because it's an evolutionarily successful strategy (from a media capture standpoint, not human biological survival).  At present, US media is grappling with this question:  was Maj. Hasan a "terrorist," or just "psychotic"?  Of course, this is a false dichotomy, but the reasons why it is false, in my opinion, illuminate a fundamental failing of the Nation-State system that is growing increasingly problematic for its survival.

The media's categories of terrorist vs. psychotic is an attempt to divide an expansive continuum of actors into two neatly distinct sets that resonate with the over-simplified american understanding of global events post-9/11.  Not only is it inaccurate and misleading, but it also highlights fundamental structural weaknesses of our current system as outlined below.

While still a false dichotomy, I think a more useful categorization is to view individual actors' motivations as a mix of influence/control of an outside hierarchy and individual feats of self-organization based on freely dispersed influences (memes, though that term has met with mixed reception).  While the media seems intent on categorizing Hasan either as someone that was acting at the behest of a "radical yemeni cleric" or as someone who "snapped," my categories better capture that all actors represent some mix of self-motivated emergence and strict hierarchical control.

Understanding the continuum of individual actors as emergence of memetic influences:  philosophy, religion, economic circumstances, individual neurochemical feedback-loops.

The false dichotomy resistance--it's just action, and the Nation-State's insistence of framing the issue in terms of enemies and opposition fundamentally fails to understand the problem.

Rose-colored glasses: the security-state's understanding of the challenge posed by the "lone-wolf" threat, and the desire to categorize perceived threats to facilitate the illusion of control (e.g. that they aren't "lone-wolfs").  Because this emergence is not intentionally crafted as an opposition to the state, the state's efforts to fight an "enemy" fail to exert any leverage on the center of gravity of the problem.

Ultimately, the Nation-State lacks understanding and ability at what I've called "Guided Emergence."   Some may suggest that the Nation-State is, in fact, highly competent in this area but is simply hiding its ability to control the masses (i.e. UN black helicopters or Bilderbergers).  I reject this--the Nation-State is neither this monolithic nor this competent.  Instead, evidence suggests that the Nation-State's efforts to fight the symptoms of an emerging global threat are fundamentally misguided.  Of course, as I set forth in my thesis on the future of the Nation-State, the process of guided emergence is antithetical to the constitutional nature of the Nation-State itself, one reason why I see little future for that institution.  Quite the Catch-22.

This phenomenon can be see not only in the current media fixation on salafi jihadism, aka "Islamic Terrorism," but also environmental movements, nationalist movements, etc.  I've even toyed with facilitating the Nation-State's use of the concept of guided emergence in my former job as a counter-terrorism analyst focused on dams and water/electrical infrastructure.  There, I suggested that rather than follow the traditional "interdict/prosecute" model of domestic counter-terrorism, we would be better served by guiding followers of, say, Derrick Jensen, away from the idea that they can achieve their goals by destroying dams and toward the idea that they can best address the fundamental causes they seek to rectify by, for example, pursuing something akin to the Diagonal Economy.  Needless to say, this idea wasn't well received by the Nation-State apparatus.

Can the Nation-State guide emergence of the global threat away from its own centers of gravity?  Can improved public diplomacy solve the problem, or are the demands of the Western Nation-States (e.g. the maintenance of standard of living and relative temporal and geopolitical position via exploitation of the global commons and a global South) simply too antithetical to the concept of guided emergence?  Alternatively (and perhaps diabolically), will the western Nation-States exploit the gene/meme interface via political story-telling (e.g. Ayn Rand), nationalist religions (e.g. an updated take on National Socialism)?  Or will our consciousness itself bifurcate or metastasize in a fundamentally game-changing way as Julian Jaynes suggests happened several thousand years ago?

I'm only beginning to grapple with these issues, but I do feel confident that fluency with the politics/psychology, meme/gene interface will be the core competency in the future struggle between competing political structures (e.g. hierarchy vs. Rhizome, the Diagonal Economy vs. the Market-State).

The Diagonal Economy 3: Growth and Sustainability

I’ve written before about the Problem of Growth.  There, I suggested that our current civilization is structurally unsustainable because an excess of hierarchy requires that it seek perpetual growth.  There, I argued that we must build a non-hierarchal and locally self-sufficient alternative structure that I call Rhizome to replace our current economic and political structure if we are ever to achieve actual sustainability.  Of course, I’ve always recognized that Rhizome is not a practicable mass-transition strategy—it could exist at the peripheries, perhaps even creating a valuable symbiosis with “primary” society, but it’s plainly not realistic to suggest that we just abandon “hierarchy” and adopt “Rhizome.” 

Some readers may have wondered by now about the similarities and differences between the Diagonal Economy and Rhizome—are they the same, am I abandoning my previous theory and replacing it with a new one, etc.?  While there is some overlap, the simplest answer is that the Diagonal Economy and Rhizome are two separate concepts intended for two separate purposes. 

Rhizome was always intended as a theoretical counterposition to hierarchy—its purpose was to explore the problems with our current system by imagining its opposite and attempting to frame it in a way that would be viable.  But it is, in the end, a theoretical model.  I think it can provide useful guidance for people in the unusual position of building something from the ground up—usually very small or remote situations—and while I think it provides much practical guidance in design (as it influenced my development of the Diagonal Economy), it provides little guidance about implementation or transition amidst real-world challenges and constraints.

The Diagonal Economy was created with the express purpose of filling that gap left by Rhizome theory.  I’m less interested in articulating a pristine model for non-hierarchal and sustainable organization than I am in articulating a set of trends and principles that we can all use, at all levels, to guide the continuing evolution and emergence of human civilization.  The Diagonal Economy is expressly intended to adapt the theory developed as “Rhizome” to provide answers and guidance to the challenges that I predict we will face in the coming century.  As such (and as suggested by the title of this post), the Diagonal Economy is intended as a set of guidelines for growing a truly sustainable civilization—specifically, one that has a scale-free absence of the need to grow—within and only eventually replacing the Legacy economic and political structures.

I won’t repeat the argument that I’ve made at length before, but the Problem of Growth is at the core of our civilization’s problems.  Many people suggest that overpopulation is the core problem, but this, too, is but a symptom of our structural problem of growth.  While I think the Diagonal Economy provides many other advantages as a model for transition, most of these are ultimately subsumed under its ability to address the Problem of Growth.  Again, while details of this approach are discussed in the linked articles (and will be covered in more depth later), the keys to addressing the Problem of Growth are scale-free self-sufficiency, non-hierarchal political, economic, and social structures, and an ethic and aesthetic of elegant simplicity.  As I will explain in coming posts, these qualities can be infused into our current structure gradually, rather than attempting some kind of revolution of direct confrontation and sudden replacement.  And this can be done at all levels—not only does it not require action by “others,” but it also does not offer the excuse that we’re waiting on “them.”

In this sense, by attempting to provide a realistic and implementable approach to addressing our civilization’s structural Problem of Growth, the Diagonal Economy may be the only “program” that offers any real hope of achieving true sustainability, not just greenwashing or empty victories.

Diagonal Economy 1: Overview

I often have a difficult time articulating my vision of the future.  Some people think that I’m a “doom and gloom” type—that there will be small, fortified islands of farming communities trying to fend off the starving masses after civilization collapses due to energy shortages.  Others, of course, think that I’m either hopelessly optimistic or a hopeless romantic, and that I’m suggesting we can replace modern society wholesale with some fantasy-world of cooperative networks of suburban homesteads.  While I understand how these misperceptions have come about, I haven’t done a very good job (yet) of articulating how I do, in fact, see the future of civilization unfolding.  That’s my hope for this Diagonal Economy series:  to outline the major forces and systems driving the evolution of our civilization and economy, including in-depth analysis of major forces and thoughts on how we can help, or gain from, the resulting trends.  This first post in this series will provide an overview of my vision of the Diagonal Economy--you can keep track of the larger series at the Table of Contents .

This civilizational and economic evolution will, under my theory, give rise to what I’m calling the “Diagonal Economy.”  I initially planned to use the phrase “Parallel Economy,” but that sounds too much like a mere shift to black and gray markets, instead of addressing the more fundamental, structural shift that I predict away from hierarchal organization to a flatter, peer-to-peer form of organization that I have called “Rhizome ” elsewhere.  Perhaps “envision” is a better word than "predict"—I advocate for this shift, and think that it makes sense from several perspectives (fulfilled ontogeny and true sustainability in particular), but what I am not doing is suggesting, like some Marxist prophecy, that this shift is somehow our civilization’s destiny.  I think this shift will occur on some level, but that it will meet powerful resistance.  In the end, it is primarily a set of tools that will become increasingly available to those who wish to shape their own future.

Here, I think that “diagonal” best captures this shift—movement along one axis (energy consumed and scale) and along a second (degree of hierarchal order of organization).  The term also draws from a discussion (using the same label) in the Intermezzo section of Antonio Negri’s and Michael Hardt’s “Empire.”

So what is the Diagonal Economy?  Ultimately, I see it as a structural response to the various forces that will increasingly shape the coming century and beyond.  A limited list includes energy descent; other resource constraints; imminent ecological and climatic pressures; the limits of human ontogeny; information processing burdens; and the breakdown of the nation-state system.  I use the term “structural” quite a bit, yet I rarely define what I mean by it.  Each of these forces, for reasons that I will explore in individual posts in this series, have particular impacts on hierarchal structures.  Likewise, each force interacts differently with what I’ve called “Rhizome ” --topologically flatter, peer-to-peer networked structures that exhibit scale-free self-sufficiency.  While I don’t suggest that we will—or could—abandon hierarchy entirely in favor of rhizome, I do think that each of these forces will more negatively affect hierarchal patterns of organization than they will affect rhizomatic patters.  For that reason, while I actually predict a reactionary response by hierarchy, when confronted by these patterns, to enhance the hierarchal nature of existing structures, I think that there will be the opportunity to instead confront these forces with increasingly rhizomatic solutions.  So, in that sense, the Diagonal Economy is my proposed solution to humanity’s current and dawning challenges.

That may work as a statement for the intent of this notion of “Diagonal Economy,” but it isn’t much of a description.  I hesitate to articulate a vision for the Diagonal Economy, not because I’m worried about being proven wrong (I’m quite confident that will happen often enough), but because I don’t want to limit the modes of expression of the basic principles that I will articulate.  That said, I think it’s worth describing one possible manifestation:

The diagonal economy might rise amidst the decline of our current system—the “Legacy System.”  Using America as an example (but certainly translatable to other regions and cultures), more and more people will gradually realize that there the “plausible promise” once offered by the American nation-state is no longer plausible.  A decent education and the willingness to work 40 hours a week will no longer provide the “Leave it to Beaver” quid pro quo of a comfortable suburban existence and a secure future for one's children.  As a result, our collective willingness to agree to the conditions set by this Legacy System (willing participation in the system in exchange for this once "plausible promise") will wane.  Pioneers—and this is certainly already happening—will reject these conditions in favor of a form of networked civilizational entrepreneurship.  While this is initially composed of professionals, independent sales people, internet-businesses, and a few market gardeners, it will gradually transition to take on a decidedly “third world” flavor of local self-sufficiency and import-replacement (leveraging developments in distributed, open-source, and peer-to-peer manufacturing) in the face of growing ecological and resource pressures.  People will, to varying degrees, recognize that they cannot rely on the cradle-to-cradle promise of lifetime employment by their nation state.  Instead, they will realize that they are all entrepreneurs in at least three—and possibly many more—separate enterprises:  one’s personal brand in interaction with the Legacy System (e.g. your conventional job), one’s localized self-sufficiency business (ranging from a back yard tomato plant to suburban homesteads and garage workshops), and one’s community entrepreneurship and network development.  As the constitutional basis of our already illusory Nation-State system (.pdf) erode further, the focus on #2 (localized self-sufficiency) and #3 (community/networking) will gradually spread and increase in importance, though it may take much more than my lifetime to see them rise to general prominence in replacement of the Nation-State system.  Ultimately, the conceptual “map” of the American Nation-State will re-open, and those pockets that best develop a Diagonal Economy to fill that gap will enjoy the most success in what will otherwise be a time of substantial—though I think largely subconscious—transition.

That might be unsatisfactory as a description of the Diagonal Economy in action—I’m happy to elaborate in comments.  In upcoming posts, I will articulate this vision in more detail by focusing on component forces and phenomena within this shift to the Diagonal Economy.  Hopefully a coherent picture will emerge, and a set of principles and tools will be clearly defined.  But, if this vision is only clear in my own head, please let me know.  My goal here is to figure out how to translate something that is half intuition and half foggy notions into a comprehensible essay . . .

The Rise of the Diagonal Economy and the Transition to Decentralization

Below is an outline of the general chapter structure of my next series of posts—these on the notion of a “Diagonal Economy” (drawing from the use of the term by Hardt and Negri ).  I hope to 1) outline my positive vision for a post-peak-everything world, 2) outline a set of principles and forces for use in decision making and strategic planning, and 3) spur further discussion on the topic.  I’ve linked this Table of Contents on my side bar—I won’t necessarily proceed through these chapters uninterrupted over the next 13 weeks, so this TOC may be useful in pulling the overall process together into one coherent piece:

1.  Overview of the Diagonal Economy - (Lay out vision, discuss the similarities and differences between the Diagonal Economy and existing gray and black market economies, the meaning of “diagonal” compared to parallel overlapping systems)

2.  The Diagonal Economy and Energy Descent – (Why declining energy and net energy will lead to reduction in the ability of hierarchal and centralized systems to function, and why as a result we’ll need to revert to more localized and smaller scales production systems, at least for most physical goods.  Hierarchal and centralized systems don’t voluntarily downsize well, and may not be able to adapt effectively to lower energy environments, resulting in both a growing need/demand for the Diagonal Economy and a growing low-competition space for it to flourish)

3.  The Diagonal Economy and Sustainability – (Why the legacy hierarchal economy is fundamentally unsustainable; the opportunity to build an economic system compatible with true sustainability)

4.  The Diagonal Economy and Human Ontogeny – (Why the legacy hierarchal economy is fundamentally incompatible with human ontogeny; why that won’t be resolved by merely allowing current institutions to collapse and reconstitute on smaller scales; why the Diagonal Economy shows promise in being able to overcome these issues and provide a high quality of life when measured by a human-ontogeny-relevant metric while simultaneously dealing well with energy descent and sustainability issues.  Propose new metric based on fulfillment of humanity’s genetic ontogeny while providing opportunity or spiritual growth)

5.  The Diagonal Economy and The Power of Networks – (The Diagonal Economy is not a regression to a less sophisticated form of organization—on the contrary it is arguably a more sophisticated form of organization that combines some elements of historical economics with new understanding of network and information theory that is only now widely understood.  This allows the Diagonal Economy to significantly fulfill human ontogeny while simultaneously maintaining its own in direct competition with the legacy hierarchal economy merely on “sales pitch” items of material consumption—discussion on legacy-economy-sponsored states and use of force later…)

6.  The Diagonal Economy and the New Map – (Gray markets, non-Cartesian and uneven conceptual terrain, and the re-opening of the map.  While all politicians maintain that we live in “Nation-States,” this is already a shallow statement, and energy descent will further the minimal extent to which the state fulfills its constitutional promise to its theoretical “nation.”  In reality, we’re slipping in to a market state system (some places faster than others, or in different ways than others) but on universal constant is the increasing ability for the Diagonal Economy to gain ground)

7.  The Diagonal Economy:  A Society of Entrepreneurs - (and Entrepreneurial Communities)—and why this will be necessary as we transition from Nation-State to Market-State.  Sharon Astyk (sp?) has written a book called “A Nation of Farmers.”  I think we must take this a step further—“A Society of Entrepreneurs.”  It goes unstated that farmers are entrepreneurs, but all of us are ultimately entrepreneurs—it’s just that for most of us, the business we choose to engage in is the sale of our time and services to (usually) one customer in a specific job market, otherwise known as a “job.” 

8.  The Diagonal Economy and Localized Diversification – (People who work a standard job don’t tend to think of themselves as entrepreneurs—and that’s a poor entrepreneurial business plan. Family/Community Systems Design, and the Resiliency of Multiple “Careers.  We all do several things, but we need to start designing these systems of activities to most resiliently provide for the goals of our families and communities, rather than assume that the State will do so for us.)

9.  The Diagonal Economy:  Surge Capacity as a Measure of Brittleness – (Surge Economics and why working under capacity is beneficial)

10.  The Diagonal Economy:  Resilient Quality of Life Metrics and the Resurgence of Vernacular Technology - (how, when we begin to focus on maximizing the resiliency of our quality of life, we will simultaneously begin to shift toward the use of “vernacular” technologies that require fewer concessions to unsustainable and hierarchal “other”)

11.  The Diagonal Economy:  Localized and Peer-to-Peer Design and Manufacturing – (Localized manufacturing, collaborative and open-source design, and the potential boundary layer between the Diagonal Economy and the Legacy Economy)

12.  The Diagonal Economy:  Interface, Parasitism, and Boundary Layers with the Legacy System – (Economic, Political, Legal, and Military interface and relationships between the Diagonal Economy and the legacy hierarchal global Nation-State/Corporate economic system)

13.  The Diagonal Economy:  Overlaps and localization in law, sovereignty, and the use of force in a post-peak-Nation-State World – (Lessons from Mexico, the breakdown of exclusive legal systems, and the potential for adaptation and resiliency by the emergent Diagonal Economy)

One possible complement to this series is my plan to gradually go through several strategic principles, systems thinking principles, game theory concepts, and show their application to the ideas discussed on this site.  I may intersperse these chapters with such strategic commentary where appropriate, or I may integrate them into these posts.

Neo-Chiefdoms or Big-Men Networks?

I recently discussed the potential for collapse of the Mexican Nation-State, and I’ve previously written about my view that the Nation-State system in general is fading. What will replace it? In general, I reject Philip Bobbitt’s hypothesis in “Shield of Achilles” that the Nation-State system will be replaced wholesale with a “Market-State” system. To be fair, however, he isn’t necessarily advocating that Nation-States will be replaced by Market-States in the way we flip a light switch. Rather, he is arguing that, for all the reasons the nation is no longer a viable constitutional basis for state power, the market may represent an alternative toward which states may--and some are already--transition toward. While I presented a more detailed critique of Bobbitt’s theory in my essay The New Map, recent turmoil in the markets, the rising violence in Mexico, and countless other events around the world suggest that the state--regardless of its constitutional basis--is slipping from its dominant role. I have little doubt that some vestige of the state will remain for the foreseeable future. However, in terms of geography, penetration, and time, the reach and control of the state will increasingly be limited. It will present voids in these various dimensions that will be filled by other power structures. And that’s the topic I plan to address in this post: what will fill the vacuum of state power?

In archaeology, the traditional progression of social order, from lower to higher complexity, is as follows: tribe, big-man group, chiefdom, proto-state, and state. While the lines between these designations are necessarily blurry, there is also a general increase in centralization and hierarchy as one moves from the less complex to the more complex. Do these archaeology terms provide any insight into the social organization of Nation-States post collapse, or of Nation-States that have transitioned to Market-States and abandoned the notion of a social contract? Perhaps--here are two contemporary examples:

In Mexico, the effective penetration of the state is rapidly retreating, and has been effectively replaced--at least in some areas, times, and roles--by the drug cartels. While consistently referred to as “drug-cartels” in the domestic and foreign press, that term doesn’t seem to do justice to their political platforms or business models any more than it suffices to call Goldman Sachs a “bank.” More accurately, these drug cartels could be described as diagonal chiefdoms. In the anthropological lexicon, “chiefdom” means an intermediately complex form of social organization that 1) exhibits ranked social order, but 2) does not control or extend institutionally into all aspects of social organization. The cartels are certainly ranked (making them more “complex” in the standard lexicon, than big-man groups), and they also exhibit a limited institutional reach (falling short of proto-state by largely ignoring any commitment to a social contract and delegating religion and spirituality to a non-integrated catholic church).

Conversely, I think the internet--specifically the “blogosphere” (a terrible term, but there you have it)--stands as an example of a “big-man group.” More precisely, it is a network of big-man groups that already occupy a diagonal beyond the exclusive control of the state. Big-man group is another anthropological term that requires defining: a non-hierarchal social structure structured by the influence of “big men” actors who gain their influence through success in a relevant endeavor--growing tubers in Melanesia, popularity in High School social systems, or visitor counts and links in the blogosphere, for example.

Why does it matter what organizational structure back-fills the retreating state? Consider these alternate structures in light of Hakim Bey’s concept of the “TAZ” (actually, his essays on periodic autonomous zone, permanent autonomous zone, or no-go zone may be more appropriate here) and Hardt & Negri’s “Diagonal”: these neo-chiefdoms and neo-big-men-groups are not exclusive in Cartesian space, but rather coexist--with the Market-State, and with each other. Within the Nation-State context this is often phrased “civil society,” but in a post-Nation-State world it will be much different. These Chiefdoms and Big-Men Groups will go beyond modern civil society and fill the vacuum of part of the role of the state--specifically, rather than a single state claiming a monopoly on the use of violence within a Cartesian space, multiple organizations, actors, and networks will claim some source of legitimacy in the use of violence.

Minimizing the oppressive use of violence is far more than a mere nicety--the difference between the minimally complex hierarchal structure (chiefdom) and the minimally complex non-hierarchal structure (big-men network) may be the difference between success or failure (especially from a median quality of life standpoint) in a post-Nation-State, post-Peak Oil civilization. Without the energy surpluses required to fuel a broad-based consumer society, and the related ability to impose a global “South” as a productive base, local feudal chiefdoms do not hold much promise for the median, especially after enough of the local surplus has been siphoned off to maintain the trappings befitting chiefly rank. Just ask the median Mexican in Sinaloa or Tijuana how well that system is working for them. Conversely, the overlapping big-men network represents the application of the blogosphere model to the primary economy. I’ve discussed the benefits of this type of model elsewhere--resiliency through decentralization, parallel innovation/information processing, the elimination of the information processing burden of a centralized hierarchy, the elimination of the need for political surplus that can no longer be sustained in a post-peak environment, etc.

Certainly any power vacuum left by a retreating state will be filled by some combination of both hierarchal and networked organizations. The lesson here--as undeveloped as my thinking out loud may be--seems to be that we must take the initiative to ensure that this vacuum is not filled by an inferior, hierarchal solution along the lines of a neo-chiefdom

Towards a Scale-Free Energy Policy

With gas and oil prices far below recent highs, and the nation’s attention turned to the “financial crisis,” energy policy is no longer in the political spotlight. But for a variety of reasons, such as the relentless march of depletion and the effect of low prices on investment in future oil and gas production and the development of renewable sources, there has never been a greater need for a bold new energy policy.

But energy policy is not the only crisis that we face. Far from it. More than a brilliant new political solution to our energy problems, what our civilization truly needs is to adopt a bold new process for developing political solutions in the first place. We need a process for developing political solutions that doesn’t depend on someone else to solve our problems for us, but that simultaneously allows people with more power to carry a commensurately larger share of the burden. We need a process for developing political solutions that increases systemic resiliency, rather than driving ever lower civilizational marginal returns on investments in hierarchal complexity. We need a process that leverages parallel information processing and develops locally-appropriate solutions, rather than clinging to the Nation-State fantasy that a single state solution can adequately serve a monolithic “nation.”

In short, we need to implement a system of scale-free design.

Scale-free design describes a process that operates similarly at any scale, at any level of organization, that is fractal in structure. It is neither grass-roots nor top-down, but rather consciously, simultaneously “all of the above.” More than that, rather than merely a collection of separate national, local, and individual programs, it strives to develop programs and practices that operate simultaneously at all these levels. A simple example would be the achievement of 25% energy self-sufficiency—that is, for individuals to produce 25% of their energy needs domestically, for communities to produce a further 25% of their energy needs locally, etc.

Scale-free policies provide all the benefits listed above. A scale-free energy policy does not reinforce a top-down structure of society, but rather builds resiliency by increasing self-sufficiency at all level and eliminating single points of system failure and the potential for cascading failures. For those who have read my writings on rhizome, it is a process that is fundamentally compatible with both our present political structure and with a rhizome alternative, and that can help to foster just such a “diagonal.” Rather than increasing the hierarchal nature of our civilization, it presents the potential to facilitate a more networked, peer-to-peer version of society—critical in an age of resource constraints because this at least reduces our structural need for perpetual growth. Additionally, scale-free processes abandon the antiquated, serial method of innovation and information processing favored by traditional politics (the “cathedral”) and instead leverage parallel processing, a “bazaar” of innovation. The result is that, rather than trying one solution until we can confirm that it fails to meet our diverse demands, we simultaneously develop thousands of solutions that are tuned to our many separate needs, and then share what works, what doesn’t, where, and why for the next iteration.

Scale-free energy policy promises all of these benefits. Such a policy will also focus on renewable sources and simple, vernacular technologies where possible. While renewable, carbon-neutral sources are not a strict requirement, any honest search for resilient solutions must avoid those “solutions” that actually do nothing more than shift the timing or mode of our crisis. Similarly, a solution cannot be truly scale-free, and does not provide the promised resiliency, if it does actually enhances an individual’s or community’s reliance on technologies or materials that it cannot itself produce. This is not an orthodoxy that individual solutions must not use metals they cannot mine and smelt themselves, as an extreme example, but rather suggests a guiding principle that simplicity—of materials, construction, operation, and repair—appropriate to the level of organization is yet another means of enhancing long-term resiliency.

This notion of scale-free design is applicable to many political problems: the fundamental structure of our economy, our system of law and norm-enforcement, our military tactics, etc. While I plan to elaborate on specifics of a scale-free energy policy in the near future, today I’ll briefly outline a pragmatic approach to this theory. A scale-free energy policy should, at a minimum, invoke simultaneous actions at the individual (household), community, regional, and national level. It should not focus exclusively on only conservation or generation at any of those levels, but instead realize that 1) generation (in whatever form) is necessary on every level, 2) conservation is similarly necessary, but 3) conservation must be approached with an understanding that picking the low-hanging fruit first (the highest elasticity demand) is counter-productive in that it actually reduces the overall systemic elasticity. These ends can be achieved through tax-breaks, direct subsidy or works programs, and (not to be neglected) simple explanation and coordination (public-private partnership, state-federal cooperation, etc.). More important than describing specific programs at this point (at least in a post intended to explain the scale-free design process) is the statement of a simple imperative: every action, at every level, should be conceived and executed within this scale-free framework. What that means is that people don’t need to wait for their government to get with the program: any level can independently implement a scale-free solution, part of which includes advocating its adoption at other levels…

A Resilient Suburbia 4: Accounting for the Value of Decentralization

This series has been considering the role of suburbia in a post-peak future. One necessary, though generally ignored, element of any analysis of suburbia is a consideration of the value of decentralization per se. The decentralized mode of suburbia presents problems (greater energy requirements for transportation), and advantages (greater potential for individual self-sufficiency), but what about the economics and politics of decentralization itself?

This post will argue that, when measured from the perspective of the median participant, decentralization offers a superior structure for both economic and political organization, a structure that may prove far more sustainable in a post-peak world than our current, centralized, hierarchal patterns of organization. Suburbia, not as a model for material consumption, but as a legal and social lattice of decentralized and more uniformly distributed production land ownership, has the potential to serve as the foundation for just such a pioneering adaptation—a Resilient Suburbia.

There are many efficiencies gained through centralization and specialization (of both place and activity, or, as Jaques Ellul termed it, “technic”). These two principles combine to lay the foundation for most of “classical” economic theory. These efficiencies, however, also produce externalities—side effects that are generally unrecognized and unaccounted for when weighing the value gained by centralization and specialization. I’ve termed these “anti-economies.”

When weighing civilizational choices, it is also important to considering the dueling perspective of the median vs. the mean. A policy that grows overall wealth in an economy (raising the mean wealth) does not necessarily increase the wealth of most people within that economy (which is best measured by the median wealth). Is an overall richer society comprised of one super wealthy Tiger Woods and 100 destitute peasants preferable to an overall poorer society comprised primarily of a “middle class” at some level of wealth above destitute peasantry? How do we weight the value—from the perspective of economics, politics, sociology, sustainability, etc.—of equality of distribution versus overall wealth distributed? This is a question that is critical to any consideration of the value of decentralization, and represents a lens through which we must view the relative value of suburbia and its alternatives, their present failures, and future potential.

While, to some extent, the economics and politics of centralization cannot be separated, there are clear economic benefits to centralization and specialization. Great cities from New York and London in the present to the Hanseatic free cities or Phoenician trading bases of the past demonstrate this in spades.

If the economic advantages of urbanization are so clear-cut, what are its economic disadvantages? First, as an expression of hierarchy, a boundary analysis of cities must include their constituent hinterland—the region that produces the raw materials for urban production and consumes the services and products produced in the urban core. In our increasingly globalized world, this hinterland is also global—for example, the Vietnamese factory worker churning out products designed by the downtown LA design firm and financed by New York banks, or the peasant farmer’s income impacted by the cheap, subsidized grains produced on industrial farms and exported through the ports of major US cities. (Which comes first: the masses of urban poor dependent on government and aid organizations or the flight of farmers from small plots where they cannot compete with subsidized western agricultural exports?) In addition, peer-polity competition for control and coordination of this hinterland makes the hierarchal model of urbanization fundamentally growth-driven, and therefore unsustainable. Cities are peer-polities, competing with each other to coordinate and control the economic activity of the largest possible share of a limited hinterland. If one city were to focus on a sustainable, no-growth approach to this game, it would be out-competed by others more concerned with near-term growth and intensification. This is natural selection among polities. Cities, by virtue of their necessary participation in the global peer-polity “eco-system,” are forced to adopt unsustainable practices—or they are out-competed in the game for near-term survival by those who do. Where a superficial sustainability-consciousness exists, its effects are generally limited to token measures within the city’s political jurisdiction, rather than the relevant and vastly larger economic reach to its effective hinterland.

It is also important to consider the “success” of urbanization through the mean/median lens. Urbanization, and the industry, trade, and centralization of economic activity that it supports, certainly increases the mean wealth within its bounds, but what does it do to the median wealth? Further, if the requisite hinterland is included within the bounds of our analysis, does urbanization even increase the mean wealth within that boundary, or does it simply affect an increasing concentration of wealth? These are the structural disadvantages of the urban form. Do they outweigh its advantages? We simply don’t have the data to answer that question definitively. What we do know is that, especially within American and European cities, the environmental damages and marginalization of the “hinterland” population largely falls outside our borders, onto the fragile ecosystems and massive poverty of the second and third worlds. This civilizational accounting failure represents a massive subsidy to urbanization—perhaps the greatest subsidy in history, and one that is incredibly damaging and short-sighted.

No matter how energy-efficient cities may be (especially when compared to presently extant alternatives like suburbia), they are most fundamentally the manifestation of hierarchal structures engaged in peer-polity competition—a mode of human organization that, I believe, is at its core the root of humanity’s unsustainability (because it drives our demand for growth) and it is, itself, undesirable (because it emphasizes the mean at the expense of the median, marginalizing the vast majority of participants).

Not only are there distinct, structural disadvantages to the urban model, but there are also nascent advantages of decentralized, non-hierarchal organization. The potential for distributed manufacturing is one example. The potential, and advantages of decentralized innovation is another. 2000 small farmers each trying to develop a better system will develop and evaluate more theories than a single, equivalently-sized industrial farm, and the dispersed effort will also develop more locally-appropriate solutions. The advantage of decentralized innovation is particularly apparent in military innovation—the decentralized innovation laboratory of insurgents in Iraq, for example, has equaled or bettered the worlds single largest, centralized R&D facility (the US military-industrial complex), despite dramatic differences in funding, personnel, education, and other resources. Localized self-sufficiency and increased liberation from the peer-polity competition additionally frees innovators to focus on producing quality of life for the median, rather than intensifying the empire of the mean. The mindset of the 20th century was that physical aggregation was necessary for the hierarchal coordination of complex economic activities. The mindset of the 21st century may be that physical distribution excels, and is even preferable, when pursuing non-hierarchal, open source, and emergent coordination of complex economic activity.

There seems to be a nearly endless stream of skeptics who claim that physical proximity (e.g. the city) is necessary for the kind of complex economic activity that underlies our quality of life. Usually, in my opinion, these theories rely on an outdated or misinformed understanding of economic coordination. These doubters seem broadly unfamiliar with advances in open-source, distributed manufacturing; of platform-driven systems; of the potential for tying vernacular resource bases into global networks of open-source innovation. They usually focus on the services and amenities that cities can provide to the privileged few, while ignoring at great moral hazard the concomitant impact of these structures on the vast majority of its citizens—those that live beyond political borders but well within the economic hinterlands. Others point to the opportunities for interaction in urban areas—while it is certainly possible to see and interact face-to-face with more people in an urban setting on a constant basis, the attractiveness (or horror) of this situation seems far more closely tied to individual personalities and psychological adaptation than to any fundamental economic advantage of cities. Both evolutionary psychology and modern commerce suggest that cities may actually be counter-productive in these functions.

Dunbar’s number, for example, shows that human interaction functions best with group sizes of roughly 150--the norm in our ontogeny, and something that does not depend on the human density of cities. Additionally, cities may be liabilities when considering the theory of weak networks--the notion that the most powerful way to leverage humans’ limited capacity to form connections is to form several very strong, very close connections, and then several extremely distant and weaker connections. Cities present an environment more susceptible to tight-group isolation (though they don’t force such an arrangement), whereas the reliance by more distributed settlement on fairs (historically) and the internet (in modernity) may actually tend toward more powerful structure to coordinate economic activity.

This is not meant as a dispositive proof of the superior economic potential of distributed systems, but rather as food for thought—we tend to assume without questioning that cities are necessary and desirable for economic functioning, all the while ignoring significant evidence that this may be the result of little more than inertia. When readers wish to discuss a complex niche topic with other interested parties—a classic analogue for economic coordination—they are generally better served by a highly distributed virtual community (such as The Oil Drum) than by the kind of permanently physically collocated group one would find in a city. My guess is that even a well-connected individual in a “flagship city” like New York would be hard pressed to find the quality of discussion on a topic such as Peak Oil equal to what exists daily on this site. This same advantage spreads from agriculture to Medicine, to military theory--just one anecdote: go to the physical epicenters of military theory, such as the Army War College or one of the service academies, and you will fail miserably to find face-to-face discussions of the caliber you can find daily at John Robb’s blog between people from all over the world.

Additionally, highly centralized and specialized economic structures tend to require a great degree of “middle men” to effectively coordinate complex economic activity on a large scale. As a result, a huge majority of “workers” are not actually performing “end production,” but rather are performing some kind of coordination, command, or control activity. This is generally referred to as “Span of Control”—on the simplest level, one person can only effectively command so many subordinates. Historically, militaries have settled on a span of control of 5 (only 3 of which are operational). This leads to massive “middle management” in large-scale organizations. A similar effect exists in economics—while a massive dairy farm may reap significant economies of scale, it also tends to involve large behind-the-scenes forces performing management, compliance, legal, finance, marketing, transportation, human resources, and other non-milk-producing functions. Open source networks of innovation have the potential to fundamentally replace this mode of economic coordination in a manner that eliminates the need for this middle-management. Every producer a part-time innovator/theorist, and every innovator/theorist a producer. This might sound like a hippy fantasy-world to some, but it is happening right now from commodity coordination by individual peasant farmers in Africa (via cheap, disposable cell phones) to a revolution in insurgent tactics in Asia. Ask yourself, do you actually make anything? Do you even know anyone who actually makes anything? Or do you and most of your associates engage in one of these “coordinating” functions? If this is the “efficiency” of our current, city-centric economic structure, it looks more like a target of historic opportunity to me.

Finally, the same structural tendencies of our economic systems have dramatic effects on our political systems and the course of our civilization. Centralization and specialization are the opposites of self-sufficiency and independence. When we centralize production of something we require, as individuals or communities we become dependent on the system that provides continuing access. We’ve been so indoctrinated to the benefits (and hidden from the externalities) of these interlacing networks of dependency that we rarely realize the degree to which we have ceded our own potential for sovereignty. The implications are striking

A Resilient Suburbia 3: Weighing the Potential for Self-Sufficiency

A backyard garden in Oregon

Over the past two weeks, I have examined the challenges facing suburbia in a post-peak world. I’ve argued (in Part 1) that financial reality will prevent us from building an alternative to suburbia, and (in Part 2) that the superficial transportation issues facing suburbia are better viewed as a much broader economic threat posed by peak oil that equally threatens urban and suburban living. In this post, I’ll look at some of the unique advantages of our present suburban arrangement—is it possible that suburbia not only won’t be abandoned post-peak, but that peak oil will act as a catalyst for the adaptation of suburbia into a flourishing, vibrant built environment? I think it’s possible, but that it will be challenging. In this post I’ll explore this possibility—both the potential, and the challenges—of creating A Resilient Suburbia.

Specifically, this post will look at the potential of suburbia to produce some degree of self-sufficiency in food, water, and energy. At one extreme, if suburbia can sustainably produce 100% of the food, water, and energy, then the prospects are excellent for a resilient suburbia.

While true self-sufficiency may be theoretically possible, I don’t think this goal is realistic. Some degree of self-sufficiency, however, is possible. While the majority of this post will address the potential, and challenges, of attaining different degrees of self-sufficiency, there are two additional issues that must be addressed.

First is the degree of self-sufficiency relative to urban settlement. Suburbia is (in virtually all instances) a more energy intensive form of civilization than urban settlement. If, however, after adding the potential resource production of suburbia into the equation, suburbia has the potential to be less net-energy intensive than urban settlement (which, in almost all circumstances, has a lower potential for resource production), then suburbia would be, on balance, more sustainable than urban settlement.

Second, a point which I will raise now but leave unaddressed until next week’s post, is the function of economic coordination. Urban settlement, by its very nature, sits atop a large pyramid of control and dependency--in isolation it is less energy intensive, but it depends on a vast hinterland, the energy requirements of which are often ignored in calculating the sustainability of urban living. Suburbia, in contrast, has the potential to evolve into a flatter, more inclusive mode of civilizaiton (it certainly isn't there now!). Traditionally, urban areas, by virtue of their geographic density, best serve the critical function of coordinating economic activity in a hierarchal fashion. While this function—its costs, benefits, and alternatives—must be considered in weighing the sustainability of different modes of the built environment, I’ll ask that we focus discussion on the first topic for this week’s post.

1. Food:

How much of its own food can suburbia produce? In America, the average suburban lot size is approximately 12,000 square feet. That’s about a quarter-acre. At an average of 2.56 people per household, and a rough average of 10,000 feet per lot not covered by structures, that’s just under 4,000 square feet of yard per person. Of course, this ignores the potential for parks and other open spaces in suburbia to be converted to food-production. It is also an average figure—some neighborhoods will have far less space, others far more. Despite these sources of variability, it is a good jumping-off point. Is 4,000 square feet enough to provide for a person? There are three requirements: calories, nutrition, and the variety and selection necessary to support culture and quality of life. In addition, there are four limiting factors to food production in a given area: sunlight, water, labor, and soil/nutrients. In the interest of space, I’ll only address three of these: calories, nutrition, and soil/nutrients—please feel free to discuss the other requirements and constraints in comments.

Can 4,000 square feet produce enough calories to feed one person? At 26 calories per ounce and roughly 8,000 pounds of potatoes harvested from 4,000 square feet (based on intermediate yields from John Jeavons “How to Grow More Vegetables,” p. 92), that’s 3.3 million calories, or 9,000 calories per day. This is, of course, completely unsustainable, insufficiently nutritious, etc. But it does answer the question—it is possible to grow enough calories on 4,000 square feet per person. The real limiting factors are nutrition and soil, discussed below:

Can 4,000 square feet produce enough nutrients to feed one person while simultaneously sustaining and improving the soil? One issue is that topsoil has been scraped away from more recent suburban developments. How effectively can we re-build soil, and how long does it take? John Jeavons has addressed this question in depth (summarized at p. 28-29 of “Grow More Vegetables”). He concludes that 4,000 square feet is roughly enough to feed one person a complete, nutritious diet, while simultaneously improving soil quality. His method involves 60% (by area) focus on growing soil-improving crops (high carbon content food crops for eventual compost), 30% mixed high-calorie root crops, and 10% mixed vegetables.

I’m sure Jeavons’ is one of many possible ways to approach the problem. One alternative is forest-gardening, depending largely on fruit and nut production from long-lived trees coupled with understory vegetable and root crops. Another, more high-tech route is hydroponics. While I anticipate a lively discussion on these points, I’ll cut my presentation short, closing this point on a simple thought: Jeavons (a practicing expert in the area) argues that 4,000 square feet is realistic. My mother (admittedly, a Master Gardener) is doing exactly this in her roughly 5,000 square foot home garden. I don’t claim it will be easy. I don’t even argue that suburbia can consistently provide 100% of its food production. But I do argue that suburbia can realistically provide around 50% of its food, can act as a localized buffer against disruptions, and can provide a high percentage of vitamins, minerals, flavor, and culturally-important foods.

Critically, while attaining self-sufficiency on suburban lots may not be easy, it is certainly more practical to obtain a significant degree of food self-sufficiency in suburbia than it is in urban settings. This isn’t to say that urban areas shouldn’t explore gardening possibilities—it is simply to point out that suburbia’s food-production potential is an asset when compared to urban settlement. Whether or not its food-production advantage outweighs its transportation disadvantage is not clear—but more on this later.

2. Water:

In the next century, water will be one of the most critical, and scarce, resources for many parts of the world. Even in those areas where there water supplies are plentiful, there is a significant energy requirement to build, maintain, and operate the infrastructure required to gather, store, transport, and purify water. How realistic is it for suburbia to provide its own water, both for domestic use and for suburban gardening?

Many people will initially object to the potential for suburban water self-sufficiency on the grounds that rainfall is erratic, and that some areas of the country are quite arid. While it isn’t the Atacama Desert, skeptics should read Brad Lancaster’s excellent guest-post on rainwater harvesting in Tucson, Arizona (average 12” of rainfall per year). For several years now, Lancaster has been using simple rainwater harvesting techniques at his modest suburban Tucson residence to harvest sufficient rainwater for both domestic needs and to sustain an impressively productive garden. The average suburban home has a roof area of roughly 2000 square feet (garage roofs and overhangs count here, but not on home square footage). In Tucson, with 12” of rain per year, that catches as much as 14,000 gallons per year (or 40 gallons per day)—more than enough for frugal domestic usage by one family, though certainly not enough for several hot baths, a backyard pool, and multiple loads of laundry daily. In wetter climes—say, Ohio with 37.77 inches per year on average--the potential is even more clear.

Two concerns for rainwater harvesting are droughts and purification. Lancaster’s article, and his several books on the topic, address both in depth. Bottom line: storage and purification are relatively simple, cheap, and require little energy, though the solutions are by no means fool-proof. In perhaps one of the greatest differences between suburbia and urban areas, suburbia has the clear potential to be water self-sufficient, whereas dense urban areas do not.

3. Energy:

What about the potential for suburbia to produce its own energy—for heating, cooling, cooking, lighting, and transportation? While suburban homes tend to use more energy than urban homes—for all of these requirements, with the possible exception of cooking—does their potential to produce energy compensate for this?

Let’s start again with the average roof area of a suburban home: about 2,000 square feet, or roughly 780 square feet per person. Solar photovoltaics have the potential to produce roughly 180 Watts per 15 square feet, or 12 Watts per square foot (one sample spec sheet - .pdf). That works out to about 24 KW per house, or about 9 KW per person. Cut that by two-thirds to confine placement to properly oriented sections of the roof, and the average suburban home can install roughly 8 KW of photovoltaic panels (or 3 KW per person). What percentage of a home’s energy needs would that provide? First, it’s important to note that 1 KW of installed capacity doesn’t equal 1KW-Hour of production for every hour of sunlight—it provides significantly less, depending on location and weather. Based on a very informal survey of conservation-aware households, a WAG is that 20 KW-Hours per day, per household is realistic (probably conservative) for suburban electricity usage with some focus on conservation. Using the rough metric of 1300 KWh per year from 1 KW installed capacity, our hypothetical suburban household would require 5.6 KW of solar capacity. In other words, there’s plenty of roof space in suburbia to meet suburbia’s electricity demand. Two important caveats: 1) such a system won’t provide power when suburbanites currently use it (a net-metering system paired with other forms of generation would be necessary), and 2) while some households use electricity for home heating, water heating, and cooking, in many areas and homes it simply isn’t realistic to heat a home with 5.6 KW of installed solar power only.

While I’ve been focusing on photovoltaics (actually one of my less-favored forms of renewable energy) because they’re readily available and easily understood, I think that solar hot water, passive solar heating, and increasing insulation and on-demand ventilation are actually more promising means for suburbia to generate its own power. By combining passive solar hot-water and air heating with sufficient thermal mass and improved insulation and sealing, it is possible to provide nearly all energy requirements for the vast majority of suburban homes using only that home’s roof space. Urban homes often lack one of the key features of suburbia: plentify solar access. The vast majority of suburban roofs have excellent solar access--though some tree-pruning may be required. Even moderately dense apartment blocks (not to mention high-rise residential) does not have the necessary insolation to power itself through in a distributed fashion. In the interest of space, I’ll leave discussions of home geothermal and heat pumps (promising), home wind-power (less promising), and home wood-lots (less promising) for another day.

While these kinds of retrofits cost money, by improving the viability of suburban homes they don’t face the same kind of financial Catch-22 addressed in the first post in this series (whereby it isn’t possibly to finance alternatives to suburbia because credit markets are tied to the value of suburbia that is destroyed by the creation an alternative).

Additionally, it isn't realistic at present to think that we'll be able to put enough solar panels on our roofs to charge the batteries on the twin electric-Escalades sitting in our garage for the daily commute to work. I increasingly believe that suburbia can be resilient and sustainable, but not as a mere "Star-Trek" version of the present. Rather, by minimizing our travel requirements at the outset, and then transitioning to high-efficiency vehicles, ridesharing, bicycles, and especially electrified rail for remaining journeys, suburbia can adjust to a radically lower transportation energy-budget.

Conclusion

Suburbia has a significant potential to provide its own food, water, and energy. It won’t be as simple as snapping our fingers. And it likely won’t be possible for suburbia to consistently produce 100% of its needs. But I think one thing is quite clear: the potential increase in suburbia’s self-sufficiency is significantly greater than the potential for urban areas to increase their self-sufficiency in food, water, and energy. We can argue the degree to which this is the case, but I’ll be interested to see if anyone seriously disputes the issue generally. If we accept that suburbia has greater potential for self-sufficiency, and if we accept that suburbia requires more energy for transportation and transportation infrastructure in its current manifestation, then the big question is this: does suburbia’s advantage in potential self-sufficiency outweigh its disadvantage in transportation? It's quite easy to toss out an unsupported opinion on the answer--I won't attempt to do so, and I'll caution that anyone who does, without empirically and irrefutably answering the potential for suburban self-sufficiency, is just guessing. The answer partially turns on the degree to which suburbia can convert itself away from a commuter model and toward a knowledge-based, distributed production model. It also, as I’ll discuss next week, turns on the value of distributed ownership and self-sufficiency as a force in determining the political structure and evolution of civilizations.

A Resilient Suburbia? (Part 1)

Many argue that suburbia was a terrible idea—a giant waste of land, capital, and culture. I largely agree. But there you have it: suburbia happened, with no refund available. It is a sunk cost—not only the millions of homes, but the vast infrastructure for transportation, employment, governance, and distribution that is fundamentally intertwined with the suburban model. Looking into a future of energy scarcity and economic challenge, it is time for the discussion to shift from “suburbia sucks” to “what are we going to do about it?” Is it possible to build a vibrant, sustainable, and self-sufficient civilization on the framework of existing suburban development? More importantly, is there any viable alternative? This four-part series will take a critical look at suburbia in an environment of peak oil, beginning with this post’s discussion of sunk costs and credit markets as they impact our options.

This series will consist of four separate posts: 1) this post, on sunk cost and credit, 2) a discussion of the suburbia’s economic prospects and the challenges of commuting and production after peak oil, 3) the potential and limitations of producing food, water, and energy in suburbia, and 4) the impact of decentralization, self-sufficiency, and lessons from history as they inform our “solutions” to suburbia.

In this first post, I will develop the argument that sunk cost and the current credit crisis prevent any the development of any meaningful alternative to suburbia. Specifically, suburbia presents a Catch-22 situation where the theoretical viability of an alternative effectively destroys our ability to either leave suburbia or build that alternative. This is a crucial foundation to this exploration of suburbia: because there is no alternative that is both theoretically viable and realistically implementable, we must focus on adapting suburbia to a post-peak oil future.

For most readers, the threat posed to suburbia by peak oil and generalized resource scarcity is clear. I won’t detail the exhaustive arguments in support of this proposition, but briefly: peak oil threatens our ability to commute from suburbia and transport supplies to suburbia; suburban civilization is dependent on cheap energy to heat, cool, light, and transport and purify water supplies; suburban America represents too large a population for any viable, unified version of America to continue if it truly “fails” without a suitable alternative.

Suburbia in light of its alternatives: I think that we can all agree that suburbia is imperfect, perhaps even fatally flawed. What I propose is that the task, going forward, is not whether suburbia is “bad,” but rather an evaluation of our options informed by a realistic appraisal of the alternatives to suburbia. It’s fine to say that suburbia is too dependent on long, oil-powered food supply lines. What is the alternative? It’s fine to say that suburban residents will soon be unable to commute to work, and that will render suburban living untenable. What is the alternative. In the initial phases of a debate, it is valuable to refine criticism, to point out flaws. We must now move past that. Most of us understand the flaws of suburbia, but we are now at the point where it is only productive to point out a flaw if we do so to argue why a specific solution is preferable.

What are the alternatives? For my own purposes, I’ve divided the spectrum of choices into re-urbanization, re-ruralization, and clustering, but I’m interested to hear how others would categorize our choices. I will discuss each of these in a later post, but first it is necessary to outline the key hurdles facing any effort to shift to an alternative: the sunk cost of suburbia and the paucity of credit to finance such a shift.

Sunk cost is the economic concept that some costs, if they cannot be recovered once they have been incurred, have significant effects on our decision making. What is the sunk cost of Suburbia? Individual homes, for individual buyers, may not entirely represent “sunk cost” if they sell immediately, though to the decline in prices over the past months does represent sunk cost. If everyone in suburbia wanted to leave, however, then the entire suburban project--tens of trillions of dollars--would represent a sunk cost.

In layman’s terms, if you bought your house for $200,000 but can only sell it today for $50,000, then your sunk cost is $150,000. Even if you didn’t have a mortgage, that would represent a significant disincentive to selling. If your mortgage is $185,000, and you have no savings to make up the difference, you are in an even more inflexible situation. However, from a societal standpoint, the sunk cost in suburbia is even greater than the sum of its home values. There is a tremendous amount of energy invested in these homes and in the infrastructure to support them. While suburbia may be highly energy-inefficient, at some point in the not too distant future (possibly today) it will no longer be possible to replicate that kind of energy investment to create a sustainable alternative.

As the example above illustrates, declining housing values make suburbia more inelastic. As prices go down, people are less able to move out of suburbia to an alternative. To the extent that rising energy prices make suburban house values decrease, they also act to make it more difficult for suburbanites to move to more energy-efficient locations.

Similarly, as credit markets remain tight, it is increasingly difficult to both afford a move to a more energy-efficient home, as well as it is increasingly difficult to finance the development of more energy-efficient projects (whether “new urbanism,” condos, light-rail systems, or energy-retrofits of existing suburban homes).

There is a feedback-loop between declining house values and tight credit markets. Declining home values and increasing foreclosure rates (one result of declining home values) undermine the viability of mortgage-backed securities (and send shockwaves into the credit default swap markets). This makes credit tighter, decreasing the pool of people able to buy homes, which leads to further home value declines, ad infinitum. This is the core of our current financial crisis.

The even more critical problem, however, arises when that feedback-loop process interacts with peak oil. Absent the challenges of peak oil, the above cycle can eventually be “solved” through some combination of market forces and government intervention. However, if we accept that peak oil presents a challenge to suburbia, a Catch-22 situation arises. To the extent that suburbia retains its value over the long-term, we can afford to build an alternative to it that addresses the energy challenges facing suburbia. But if suburbia does maintain its value, where’s the motivation to do so? To the extent that energy challenges undermine the viability of suburbia, causing a desire to move to an alternative and a decline in the value of suburban homes, our ability to finance that alternative is destroyed.

That’s exactly the catch: to the extent that we need to end the suburban experiment, we aren’t able to do so. To the extent that early adopters “get out” soon and buy in to more sustainable alternatives, the vast majority who are left behind are increasingly stuck. For this reason, suburbia isn’t going anywhere—at least not in my lifetime. This is not to say that suburbia won’t undergo dramatic change. It will, but we're stuck with its basic existence. The potential and great challenge of making something sustainable and life-affirming out of the fact of suburbia will be the topic of the rest of this series.

Open Source Ecology--Help Needed

If you've been following my writing on rhizome, the problem of growth, and the hamlet economy, or if you've been reading John Robb's posts on the "Resilient Community," then you'll also be interested in the work being done on an open-source toolkit for the sustainable village of the future at Open Source Ecology.

There, Marcin Jakubowski, a person I met through the excellent P2P Foundation, is blazing ahead with a very real, implementable "Global Construction Set" of open-source tools, platforms, and knowledge sets to empower a future of sustainable, vernacular, and decentralized food production, energy generation, architecture, and social structures. Here's an visual overview:


One of my favorite parts of their plan is their work on an open source compressed earth block machine. This is something that is truly decentralized and vernacular-tech, but that can have a revolutionary effect on the architecture and energy demands of both the rural poor in the third world and the adventurous rich in American and elsewhere. Importantly, Open Source Ecology is not just a theory shop--they already have put much of this into practice in the real world, such as building a compressed earth block press, a hexayurt, and they're working on an open source solar turbine.

Right now what they need are both online and real-world volunteers and financial support. If you have money to contribute, this seems like a very worthy project (here's their donation page). If not, as long as you're interested in the topic you'll notice that their entire site is a wiki--contribute information, start new projects, etc. If, like me, you'd rather help design a annualized solar heating system than an open source tractor, Open Source Ecology has built an amazing platform to do just that...

Rhizome Template in the Amazon?

Research by Mark Heckenberger of the University of Florida, published in the August 26th, 2008 edition of Science (subscription), suggests that a dense civilization of networked villages once existed in the Amazon. This pattern of civilization, at least to the extent currently understood, is interesting because it appears to show a form of organization that permits density without significant hierarchy. It also has many similarities to the rhizome model that I propose in The Hamlet Economy. Heckenberger's work shows that the Xingu region of the Amazon was once populated by a grid-like pattern or villages, each connected by a precisely aligned network of roadways. What is of interest to me is that their research does not mention that some villages evolved into positions of dominance, as cultural, political, or religious centers. Instead, the network of roadways themselves, exhibiting precise angles and ceremonial features, seems to have held religious or cultural significance as a "map" of their understanding of the cosmos. This may be an approach to tackle one of the most vexing problems of organization without hierarchy--how to maintain a non-hierarchal pattern of civilization over time.


Here's an example of the tendency to centralize control structures into a hierarchal mode of organization, from my post on Rhizome & Central Place Theory.


Here's an alternate mode of organization--a networked "grid," "lattice," or "peer-to-peer" structure of small, minimally self-sufficient villages, or "rhizome" as proposed in my article The Hamlet Economy.

The Xingu settlement structure seems to consicously model itself in the latter pattern. Heckenberger even notes that each village was surrounded by a buffer zone of "managed parkland," exactly the kind of fall-back, resiliency-enhancing production zone that I recommended for rhizome. Here's a link to a satellite image of one section fo Xingu settlement.

Did this Xingu civilization really develop a dense, ecologically sustainable civilization without hierarchal structure? Or did they simply find a new way to impose hierarchy without developing the signatures of "central places"? Was this a conscious reaction to prior abuses of hierarchy, or simply an expedient to survival in the dense forrests and poor agricultural soils of the Amazon? We don't know the answers to these questions at this time, but the research of Heckenberger and his colleagues suggests that there is still a great deal for us to learn from the past about how we can best live in the future...

Re-Post: Hamlet Economy

Here's the last re-post before (original here) I return to new content, one of my favorites from that past, and a good intro to the potential for what I call rhizome, others call "networked villages" or "resilient community."

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The goal of this post is to outline a concrete framework for establishing a new economy based on rhizome structure that provides negative feedback against encroaching hierarchy, that ensures environmental sustainability, and that maximizes its compatibility with human ontogeny. I will first outline my approach to the problem, then look at one historical example—how the lattice network of Tuscan hill towns created a topology that addressed its unique circumstances, then analyze the optimal theoretical topology of a modern rhizome economy, and finally discuss some real-world concerns for the conscious design and establishment of a new hamlet economy.

Part 1: Methodology

This post aims to take the theoretical structure of rhizome, and flesh-out how a real-world economy will be built upon that model. Rhizome, in short, is defined as a non-hierarchal network of self-sufficient but interacting nodes. Within the context of a hamlet-economy, defining the threshold of self-sufficiency is the key theoretical step. It would be unrealistic to suggest that each individual be totally self-sufficient—while perhaps possible, it would result in an unacceptably low standard of living, as well as lack the resiliency necessary to prevent the accretion of hierarchy. It would be equally unrealistic to place the threshold of self-sufficiency too high, for that would create uncontrollable dependencies internal to the economic structure that would trend, eventually, towards a kind of feudal hierarchy. The exact location of the threshold of self-sufficiency may vary, but it must be at the lowest level, under the circumstances, that can:

1) Leverage the de-facto division of labor without dividing the knowledge to perform that labor. This permits raising the potential standard of living above individualized self-sufficiency, without creating dependency on the knowledge of another that can lead to hierarchy and exploitation.

2) Provide adequate redundancy to absorb sufficient systemic shock. For example, if self-sufficiency is placed at a level of two-person groups, then in the face of a shock that incapacitates one person, the other must absorb the full shock. Similarly, because this model will be based partially on horticultural modes of production, it must have enough diversity that it can absorb failures of certain crops or resource production processes brought about by weather, disease, etc.

In this model, I have placed the threshold of self-sufficiency at the familial group level. This threshold leverages the existing, biological human tendencies toward kinship, and creates a basic rhizome node that consists of roughly 10-40 people, or about 4 extended, nuclear family units.

The mode of production for this model is a hybrid of horticulture, gathering and hunting, with emphasis on a highly diverse system of horticulture (based on permaculture, fukuoka, and forest-garden concepts) to maximize standard of living, but with continual maintenance of significant spare capacity (geographic space and knowledge) to both hunt and gather to act as an absorber of systemic shocks.

Finally, the issue of specialization and specialty production must be addressed, where each node, in addition to providing minimal self-sufficiency for themselves, also produces one or more specialized product to facilitate economic interaction with other nodes, as well as to leverage the communication and information processing capability of rhizome to organize economic interaction in a way that generates much higher standards of living than can each node on their own. This latticed economic interaction is the glue that holds together the rhizome structure, ultimately serving as the strongest defense against encroachment by hierarchy—a single node cannot likely hold out against expanding hierarchy, but a well connected rhizome society of nodes can.

Part 2: Topology Lessons from a Tuscan Hill Town

This discussion of nodes and lattice is all very theoretical—it can be difficult to envision how it would actually take shape in the “real world.” For that reason, an extant, historical model that illustrates many of these concepts is useful. Tuscan hill towns are an interesting example—certainly not a perfect example of rhizome, but they are a decent example of a networked economic topology that consisted of many relatively self-sufficient nodes. They are, as with all vernacular physical geography, a unique product of their circumstances: fertile terrain punctuated by rough forests and hills, Mediterranean climate, an ancestral fabric of small farms, and a disintegration of rule by outside powers that led to the many social, economic, and technical innovations of the Italian city-states. My personal favorite is Lucignano, a relatively small and insignificant hill town depicted below. I will use it as the model hill-town for purposes of this discussion, so take a moment to familiarize yourself:

Figure 1: Here’s a map of Lucignano. Note the defensive arrangement of the housing and the patchwork of small fields.

Figure 2: Here’s an artist’s sketch of Lucignano…both the map and the sketch below depict the town in its modern form, which as far as I could tell hadn’t changed much in several centuries.

Figure 3: A picture of Lucignano that I took from the Fortezza Medicea (see map above) where I stayed for a week in May of 2002.

I trust that you’ve enjoyed your brief virtual-tour of Lucignano…

It is interesting to note the impact of the continual wars between Florence, Siena, and other renaissance city-states in Italy on the architecture of the classic Italian hill town. Is this kind of inward-looking, defensive posture necessary in an envisioned future? Can a more open design, oriented to capture passive solar possibilities, be viable? What sizes of settlements are necessary—small familial farmhouse clusters, hamlet clusters of families oriented for convenience or defense, or trading or craft-industrial villages that produce local specialty products? In the case of Lucignano, many or most farmers lived within the defensive walls and walked to their fields each day. Additionally, the degree of hierarchy—resulting from the high-level threshold for self-sufficiency (which was located at the level of the hill town—in this case over a thousand people)—was certainly not optimal. The specific architecture and economic structure will vary by climate, resources, level of defensive need, etc., but the basic network structure of the hill towns remains instructive: the hundreds of hill towns that dot the map of Tuscany formed a powerful and resilient network of localized economic interaction. Today, this same region is demonstrating a resurgence of the very kind of sustainable, “fulfilled ontogeny” economy that is the goal of this model, even though it exists within a largely hierarchal and industrial society. The “Slow Food” movement was, in fact, initiated by the mayor of Greve-in-Chianti, one of the more famous hill towns of this region, and is now spreading around the world. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, the Tuscan hill town is an important symbol of the “good life” that may ultimately be achieved through this kind of rhizome economy—it is something that is desirable even within our modern culture, that can be readily understood, and that promises not “a return to the stone-age,” but a positive vision of “moving forward with an eye to the past” that is nearly universally preferable to the experiences of modernity. Since this can be such a difficult theoretical concept to sell, the ability to relate it to a well-known example is invaluable. There are certainly other examples, but within Western culture, this one may carry the most weight.

Part 3: The Optimal Topology of Rhizome and the Hamlet Economy

Rather than try to explain the optimal topology of a rhizome structure in words, I will try to more effectively illustrate this structure in the captions of the following graphics:

Figure 4: The above illustration is the theoretically optimal topology for a single rhizome node, representative here of a familial cluster. Close and strong connections exist within the node, representing the connectivity inside the extended familial group. Outside links are variously looser and weaker connections, the closer connections with the local hamlet, and the distant connections creating inter-hamlet ties, and creating the “small-worlds” situation where weak and distant connections greatly enhance the overall efficiency of connectivity. The green region denotes the geographic space required by the node to achieve minimal food self-sufficiency.

Figure 5: The above illustration shows a hamlet, or a cluster of familial nodes. The groupings in terms of 4:4:4 is not fixed, but merely a convenient way to convey a flexible structure. Close and strong connections exist within the hamlet, and variously looser and weaker connections reach outside, replicating in a fractal manner the same “small-worlds” theory as seen in individual nodes. The larger, lighter green region represents the geographic space required for “wildlife, hunting, and foraging,” or permaculture’s “Zone 5,” which is controlled “in trust” by the hamlet for their non-exclusive use, but available for their use as a reserve-bank should their horticultural scheme underperform.

Figure 6: The above illustration represents the broader landscape of a lattice-structure of clusters of rhizome nodes. It represents a theoretical distribution, and demonstrates that there are no “super-hamlets,” towns, or villages—the landscape is “flat” at the hamlet level, because any accretion to a higher order settlement would open the door to hierarchy. Instead, more complexly coordinated functions are facilitated by temporary groupings, as shown in the next illustration.

Figure 7: The above illustration denotes the ability of transient connection, fairs, festivals, etc. to affect longer-distance, weak connectivity that greatly enhances the overall efficiency of the lattice’s communication and information processing capability. Because more distant nodes are brought in contact with these occasional events (shown as dashed blue, red, or purple lines), the number of nodes that information or exchanges must transit to span large distances is greatly reduced (as illustrated by the black line transaction, where only two steps are necessary to bridge a distance that would otherwise require 8 steps in neighbor-to-neighbor transfer). These larger, weaker, and transient networks facilitate more complex activity and more specialized economic exchange without facilitating hierarchy. For example, even if only one node in 50 actually breeds goats or brews beer, all 50 nodes will have easy access to these products through seasonal fairs, transient markets, etc. In theory, there is no limit to the technological or industrial complexity that can be handled by such transient groupings of a still “flat” rhizome lattice. This format prevents more complex projects (defense, highly specialized goods like metal working or glass, social richness) from acting as a catalyst to the creation of hierarchy.

Figure 8: The orderly geometric lattice structure must, in reality, be draped over the natural geography, to include terrain, climate, resource distribution, etc.—as illustrated above with regards to a simple topographical map. While the theoretical and geometrically symmetrical lattice illustrated in Figure 6 provides easier initial conceptualization, the lattice illustrated in this figure is more realistic. In reality, several different “conceptual terrains” will each simultaneously impact the actual geospatial structure of the lattice. For example, physical terrain, difficulty of travel, resource concentrations, water availability, soil richness, etc. will all influence the layout.

Part 4: Reality, and the Implementation of a Hamlet Economy

Real-world implementation of this conceptual “hamlet-economy” requires efforts to guarantee resiliency, coping with the existing built landscape, and achieving coordination and standardization of this fractal pattern without a top-down hierarchy.

Rhizome lattice is great, in concept. However, if it does not demonstrate adequate resiliency, it will only last until the first major systemic shock—and systemic shocks have always and will continue to impact humanity, from weather, war, technology, famine, disease, etc. The hamlet-economy fosters resiliency by using long-time-horizon resource cultivation techniques, as well as planned redundancy in resource cultivation. For example, the forest garden concept is illustrative: while all horticultural and agricultural schemes vary in annual return, failure of a forest garden scheme one year does not propagate failure in future years. With a forest garden, after establishment, large quantities of resources are stored and available for harvest to make up for shortfalls in other areas. Similarly, maintenance of spare capacity in foraging and hunting, used only minimally in years where horticulture produces well, provides a safety net for years when horticulture produces poorly. This built-in redundancy is critical to maintain the viability of horticulture—along with its normal benefit of increased standard of living—through years when horticulture performs poorly.

It is also important to recognize that the implementation of this kind of hamlet-economy will, in most circumstances, require adaptation of an existing landscape—in most cases a landscape that is not sustainable, that is hierarchal, and that is not compatible with human ontogeny. This introduces an artificiality, in the sense that the theoretical structure may be impacted by existing hierarchal infrastructure (like towns and highways). Perhaps the best way to circumvent this is to begin to “plant the seeds” of a hamlet economy in existing rural areas, and then expand into prior towns and cities as they become non-viable.

Finally, it is important to address the issue of enforcing this structural pattern without utilizing top-down, hierarchal means. One key tool in this effort will be the use of open-source arguments to explain and justify the reasoning behind adapting this pattern—such as, hopefully, this post. Another will be the use—perhaps in modernized format—of the traditional norm enforcement tool of myth. Stories explaining the pitfalls of straying from this basic structure will help to keep the core principles intact. Finally, and I think most importantly, the success of this theoretical structure will depend on the ability of the pioneer implementers to demonstrate that it provides a better standard of living than other structures. If the average American could live the “good life” of living in a stereotypical Tuscan villa, and if they are shown how they, too, CAN have this lifestyle, then people will literally flock to this structure. Ultimately, this is a POSITIVE vision of the future—not a reversion to feudal serfdom, but a progression to a more egalitarian and human-compatible life…

Vernacular Zen (re-post)

I'll post new content next Monday with a cross-post of an article on Algeria & Morocco that will soon appear in The Oil Drum. In the interim, here's a re-post of one of my favorite posts from 2004, and a much needed dose of denial-free optimism for these troubled times:

Vernacular Zen: Glimpses of "The Original Affluent Society"

I am an advocate of localization, simplification, self-sufficiency and fulfilled ontogeny. Slow food. Tribalism. A thousand other catch-phrases that, above all else, raise a singular objection from friends and critics alike: isn't your idealized vision starkly juxtaposed to your professed enjoyment of the finer things in life?

My response: on the contrary, my good friend...these worlds are in fact one in the same, only separated by the disinformation of the consumer economy.

Povero o Rico?? Is this an image of a "poor" fishing village or one of the worlds most exclusive resort islands? Actually, it's both--a picture of the idyllic island of Panarea (just North of Sicily) taken by the author while sailing away aboard the 38' sailboat "Fandango."

I have spent, to be perfectly honest, more than my fair share of mornings slowly enjoying an espresso as the fog burns off the slopes of Mount Etna in the distance, the scent of blood orange blossoms mingling with the sharp aroma of coffee. This is the kind of perfect moment that embodies our cultural ethos: sacrifice enough of what you love now, and you'll make enough money that some day you'll be able to buy back those priceless experiences in the form of a luxury cruise, a meal at that new bistro or a beach house in Florida. The irony is that this perfect moment cost about 65 cents--that's less than 8 minutes wage for a cashier at McDonald's, and yet it's enough to make highly paid executives and professionals alike salivate. This should tell us something...

The finer things in life can generally be divided into two categories: material and experiential. Despite the relentless psychological barrage of advertising, most of us can readily admit that it is the experiential that is truly rewarding and fulfilling. Many even recognize their own predilection to fulfill their desire for the experiential by compensating with an excess of the material. Commercialism tells us that the experiential--that which requires time--is too costly, out of our reach. Our time, we are led to believe, must be sacrificed to meet the demands of the economy. But time is free for all of us. It is the great equalizer, something to which we all have equally random access. But in the modern economy, where average individuals cannot directly provide for themselves, they are duped into trading time for the basic necessities of life--necessities that are directly available to the poorest of the Earth. As this economic hierarchy has intensified over time, we continue to be duped into trading our time for material possessions--far beyond those required to survive. The memes of our economic culture have convinced us that the material is a fine substitute for the experiential. A nagging doubt, dissatisfaction with our own suburbanization, some unknown, unfulfilled yearning tells us that, despire the overtures of mass-media, even the materially rich among us still long for the experiential.

The sun on your face, playing with your children, staring at a fire until late into the night, sitting still in the forest listening to the wind rush through aspen leaves, talking with friends, laying on your back in a meadow and watching the clouds pass above you. All of these things are free--they require only time. Hunter-gatherers around the world spend, on average, less than 20 hours a week "working". The rest of their time was available for the experiential, the "finer things" in life. Perhaps this is why anthropologist Marshal Sahlins calls them "The Original Affluent Society", or why Paul Shepard says that humanity's time in the "hamlet economy" was the best it ever had.

The finer things in life are nothing more than a connection and a oneness with those things that modern culture insists remain separate or "sacred". This connection is available to all of us. Reconnecting to the finer things in life is not dependent on success within the modern commercial economy...on the contrary, my good friend, this reconnection requires that we take a new--or is it old?--approach to life. This is vernacular zen.

We-Think & Rhizome Design

Limited posts for this Monday and the next two Mondays as I'm studying for the Bar exam on July 29th. As time allows (or the need for a study break dictates) I'll try to include something of substance.

This week, a follow-up on last week's post on rhizome platform design, I'm recommending the book "We Think" by Charles Leadbeater. The book, itself a product of open-source collaboration, details open-source design efforts around the world, from Wikipedia to the Grameen Bank (just for good measure, I'll link to Grameen Bank via Wikipedia...). Leadbeater is probably the world's leading thinker on the future of open-source collaboration, so, while he is not specifically focused on the core rhizome concepts of self-sufficiency, decentralization, and eliminating dependencies, his theories are potential sources of inspiration.

You can read the draft of his book free at his site, or watch his You Tube video on the topic. You can also buy it on Amazon, though I had to get my copy as a UK import--not sure when it will be available mass market in the US.

Rhizome Platform Design

In the world of technology and sustainability, there is a certain “buzz” surrounding the topics of personal manufacturing and platform design. Can we get away from the hierarchal model of centralized manufacture and distribution, and replace it with a world where design emerges from open-source collaboration and is manufactured at the point of use by 3-D printers and community manufacturing centers? Can a focus on meeting community needs, rather than selling communities products that create dependence, allow for improved localized self-sufficiency by way of platform design and localized manufacture? Maybe. There are many projects and theorists already working on these notions—the intent of this article is to suggest that these efforts operate within the framework of rhizome theory, and more importantly, that these efforts recognize their inherent weaknesses that rhizome theory was developed to overcome.

One example of this trend toward community manufacturing and platform design is the LifeTrac open source tractor project. There, an online collaborative called OpenFarmTech is trying to leverage engineers, users, and innovators around the world to develop a design for an inexpensive, low-maintenance tractor that can be manufactured, used, and repaired by third-world communities. I think this is a fascinating project, and one that John Robb has highlighted as an example of the potential for community fabrication. However, it’s also an example of the potential pitfalls of thinking that platform design or personal/community manufacturing per se will advance local resilience and self-sufficiency. The LifeTrac tractor, for example, still relies on an internal combustion engine, metal-based hydraulics, and rubber tires, just to name a few components that most certainly won’t be manufactured at the community level, or derived from raw materials available at the community level. While the LifeTrac project may free rural communities from dependence on specific, for-profit tractor manufacturers, it will not free them from dependency (and the associated side effects) on distant manufactures of engines, smelters of metals, or producers of tires. While this may be an improvement, it’s a Pyrrhic victory at best, as it will only transfer to locus of their dependency-derived problems, and will not actually bolster their resiliency to external shock or their ability to extract themselves from the growth-related problems that come from lack of localized self-sufficiency.

LifeTrac embodies the problems inherent in the promise of 3-D printers, extreme-personalization, and other examples of technology-first platform design. But these problems are not inherent in the notion of platform design itself. It is possible to properly yoke the technology of platform design to the needs and objectives of creating a resilient, minimally self-sufficient community. As an example of such a rhizome approach to platform design, let’s consider mud bricks…

Like the LifeTrac’s focus on meeting community agricultural needs, mud brick technology could play a critical role in community development in many environments—leverage a global knowledge base to create buildings with low heating and cooling energy requirements, safe from earthquakes, resistant to erosion, capable of impressive structural feats, etc. Unlike LifeTrac, however, an open-source platform for use of mud brick technology need not create or continue dependencies on external sources of raw materials, external manufacturing, etc. In fact, it has the potential to significantly reduce the dependence of most developing rural communities on imported cement, and it has the potential to provide the benefits of cement (and beyond) to those minimally-developing communities that can’t afford or source cement at present. This may become in increasingly important issue in the near future as global cement production (and the energy it consumes) skyrockets. Sure, an open source platform to develop mud brick technology isn’t very sexy (unlike a tractor!), but goals like producing high R-value adobe with excellent structural properties could produce amazing results.

When considering the architectural and infrastructure issues that advanced mud brick could address, many scientists, engineers, and corporations will completely ignore the potential for using vernacular materials, instead seeing a general materials engineering problem, or an infrastructure design problem. They’ll say something like:

“Well, concrete can be effectively adapted to meet the shelter needs of people in community X. We can create an inexpensive insulated concrete form that combines the high-mass concrete with a polyurethane foam insulation to provide both high R-value, high thermal mass, and excellent structural strength.”

That works fine if the goal is to enhance dependency on non-local manufacturing, or non-local extraction of raw materials, etc. However, if the goal is to increase localized resiliency and self-sufficiency, then projects must always be pursued with that in mind. In the same example, these engineers might instead say:

“Well, concrete is out as most communities don’t have access to the raw materials, or to the energy necessary to process it. Sure, we’ll still use concrete for some applications, but where possible we will use some kind of locally-produced product. Most communities have ready access to the requirements for mud-bricks, so let’s instead find a way to use those materials to achieve the same end as an insulated concrete form.”

And then those same engineers could embark on an open-source development program that will produce flexible technologies that can be adapted by individual communities to meet their needs with locally available tools, materials, and production. How exactly will they do this? I have no idea—that’s exactly the point: when the goal of the design process is to support, not defeat, local resiliency and self-sufficiency, then that is exactly what the design process will produce. That’s the potential for combining rhizome with platform design and personal manufacturing...

One example of rhizome platform design already in action is the Cinva Ram (hat tip to BrianT). The Cinva Ram is a low-tech, low cost, but highly effective manual press for creating mud bricks out of a variety of locally-sourced materials. A team of four people can make as many as 500 bricks a day with this device, and it can be easily assembled at the community level using open-source plans. Other examples, just in the building materials arena, include advances in rammed earth construction, experiments in papercrete construction, etc.

How far can this go? Many people immediately point to modern medicine (e.g. an MRI machine) or to the internet (microprocessors) as examples of things that simply can’t be solved I this manner. They may be right. If your goal is to produce an MRI machine using only locally sourced raw materials and local manufacture, I’m pretty sure you’ll fail. However, if the goal is to produce a system of medicine that effectively serves a local community, I think there is a great deal of potential to address the problem in a truly local fashion if we can just get our goals in the right order. MRI machines are developed to make money, and they do that to the extent that they can improve health within a for-profit system. That works decently well for most people in an environment of surplus energy and amidst a solid political and economic foundation like currently exists in America or Europe. It’s a bankrupt business model in today’s third world, and quite possibly in tomorrow’s first world. While a resilient, self-sufficient community may never be able to produce its own MRI machine, I see no reason why it can’t produce an effective health-care system if it keeps that, along with local self-sufficiency, as the primary goals, and leverages a global (or even merely local) knowledge base to that end.

Crash Course

This week I'll be reviewing the book "Crash Course: Preparing for Peak Oil" by Zachary Nowak. The book has a concise introduction to the concept of Peak Oil, followed by what I see as the strength of the book: an interesting discussion on scenario planning, rounded out by an extensive guide to the skills and knowledge that will be necessary to make the best of a less-than-ideal future.

Scenario planning is something that I think is vitally important for everyone to perform on an ongoing basis. I wrote about the concept last week, but in reality it's something that we should all be doing continuously for all manner of life decisions. In "Crash Course," Nowak outlines four separate future scenarios for planning purposes (setting aside "Status Quo" and "Total Armageddon" as either too remote or pointless to plan for): The New Green Revolution (most optimistic), Powerdown USA, the Great Energy Depression, and The Crash (most pessimistic).

He then discusses the merits of planning for the future via a "refuge" or through fostering "community." He discusses the merits of these various approaches, and suggests that alternatives such as the rhizome model for communities that I've suggested may offer a viable compromise between the two. I increasingly think that the our future plans must be seen as a continuum--resilient community is the goal but cannot be just set up like a lego set; personal refuges are immediately implementable for many because they are under individual control but are not desirable long term solutions; the answer seems to lie in planting seeds of personal refuges that, from the outset, are intended to anchor the networks of sustainable community, knowledge sharing, and local solution development that will one day grow into resilient local communities. While certainly an imperfect historical parallel, I think that the monasteries of Dark Age Europe serve as a valuable example of how "refuges" can survive tough times, carry knowledge forward from past civilizations, develop newly appropriate skills and techniques, and later serve as the physical and intellectual framework for the construction of a new society. Nowak points out exactly this--that refuge and community are not mutually exclusive paths--but I would like to see this point developed in more depth. That might be asking too much, however--it's something I'd like to do, as well, but have not been able to put together satisfactory principles and rules for how it can be best accomplished. Perhaps this is because the transition plan between refuge and community is necessarily one customized to a cultural set, to a geographic area, and to an unknown future.

Nowak then discusses "the house." He goes through a variety of alternative techniques and discusses several books on the topic. Some, such as "Shelter" by Lloyd Khan are outstanding, and I second the recommendation. Others, such as Earthships, are not among my favorites (I think the Earthship design places too much emphasis on aesthetic homogeneity, and does a poor job balancing insulation and thermal mass for all but a few climactic zones--a proper mix of insulation (e.g straw bale) and thermal mass inside the insulating barrier (e.g. adobe, cob, etc.) seems like a better rule of thumb). Nowak also covers rainwater harvesting and greywater (I like his recommendations) and discusses passive annual heat storage concepts that I think are critical (though I prefer Don Steven's take to the recommendation Nowak provides, and I'm currently working to adapt these same principles to create a passive annual solar COOLING system...). I've also heard of the rocket stoves that Nowak discusses for home heating, but his recommendation made me finally purchase Ianto Evans' book on the topic. I also appreciate that Nowak points out that the "back to the land" movement of the '60s and '70s did not fail, per se, but rather helped to perpetuate knowledge of old sustainability techniques and develop new ones so they will be available when the current generation actually NEEDS them (I'd say one cause for the failure of the prior movement was it wasn't immediately necessary, in the minds of many, and lost out to the allure of moving back to the suburbs and living during the last decades of the economic "good life" in America).

Next, Nowak discusses food production and storage. Nowak points out--rightly I think--that 1) it isn't that easy to garden, and 2) that even if you're a great gardener and have a large garden, it's not always possible to count on only your own garden to meet all your food requirements due to drought, pestilence, etc. One solution to this is to diversify beyond mere raised bed gardening into perennials vegetables and forest gardens (I heartily concur with his recommendation to read Eric Toensmeir's "Perennial Vegetables" as well as David Jacke and Toensmeier's "Edible Forest Gardens."). I've discussed this very topic in "Creating Resiliency in Horticulture." I like that Nowak discusses the need to augment the yields of a garden with wild harvest from surrounding fields, woods, etc. I think this is a critical component of any resilient scheme--both skills and the access to suitable environments to ensure that when garden yields fail, natural yields pick up the slack. This is an integral part of my own planning--the need to acquire land not only sufficient to grow an intensive garden and less intensive forest garden, but sufficient to create a natural buffer (lightly "guided" with planing, rainwater harvesting earthworks, etc.) that will serve as a back up. In fact, my choice of location is largely driven by the ready availability of forageable foods--especially those that are consistent in times of drought and not readily recognized as food by most people (for me, mesquite trees). Nowak also deals with the essential skill of preserving foods--no matter how well planned and successful one's garden harvest, it's unlikely that the right food will always be available for the picking!

If I could point to one weakness in Nowak's book, it is that the book consists largely of a series of book reviews. That is also one of its greatest strengths. Any book that proclaims to provide all the knowledge that you'll need to deal effectively with Peak Oil should be dismissed as bunk at the outset. Instead, what most people (myself included) really need is a pathway to gain the knowledge necessary to succeed in a variety of future scenarios--both topical knowledge AND the analytical framework for future scenario planning to apply that knowledge. In that respect, "Crash Course: Preparing for Peak Oil" excels. "Crash Course" is like a knowledge map, outlining a concise path through the myriad of useless, incorrect, or irrelevant books, and taking you directly to those books that really should be on your shelf. I highly recommend the book for those interested in learning how to better prepare self and family for whatever future scenario you envision.

Future Scenarios

Two points for discussion tonight: David Holmgren's new Future Scenarios site and the recent Economist coverage of Peak Oil.

First, Adam Grubb of energybulletin.net tipped me off to the launch of David Holmgren's new site, futurescenarios.org. Holmgren, co-founder of the permaculture concept and still a critical proponent working to advance that field, has done an excellent job of placing the permaculture analytical framework and toolkit into the world of peak oil scenario planning. The site is still in its infancy, but is well laid out and does an excellent job of framing both peak oil and climate change in a "how can permaculture affect these problems" sense.

I think that the notion of scenario planning is a truly critical area of inquiry. This stems from the fundamental proposition that we don't know what the future will hold. I think that, with careful inquiry and investigation, we can gain a good feeling for future probabilities, but anyone who tells you that "the future WILL contain X" is most likely acting largely on faith, not reason. The closest that we can come to a "truth" is that we don't know what the future holds, but that we may be able to discern probabilities for different scenarios. In light of this probability, we must plan our course of action in light of 1) our goals and 2) the solution space of possible future scenarios.

I don't want to get bogged down in a discussion of goals, beyond the notion that it seems that we tend to get stuck on derivative goals (like increasing GDP or decreasing poverty) when these are in fact just means to achieving our actual goals--call them happiness, stability, fulfillment, etc. It's my opinion that we'd be best served by building our goals around our genetically determined requirements--in other words, to reach for fulfilled ontogeny. Once we've carefully identified our actual goals--not mere intermediary means to achieve those goals--then we can begin to approach how to achieve these goals in an unknown but probably probabilistically determinable future environment.

So what is that future solution space? Let's frame it, for the purpose of this analysis, along only one axis--future energy availability. Let's call one end of the axis "catastrophic energy cliff due to peak oil and other primary energy sources with no substantial mitigation" and the other end of the axis "unrestrained and continuing growth in energy consumption due to new reserve discoveries or the development of adequate substitutes." Or, if those labels are too lengthy, "doomer" and "cornucopian." I contend that anyone who says we "know" which way the future will go is taking an irrational, faith-based approach. Therefore, I argue that the only rational approach is to say that both scenarios (and all points in between) are possible. We can still, of course, argue about the probabilities of the various scenarios coming to pass. I think that both extreme scenarios are sufficiently possible that we must seriously plan for them, but I think that something in the general direction of the "doomer" scenario is significantly more likely over the medium to long term. This is an area that fundamentally demands individual determination, but assuming that you accept my evaluation, what is to be done about it? This is where scenario planning comes in, and it's a topic that I've discussed in the past in future planning: hedging the solution space. The basic notion--especially where it differs from conventional wisdom on planning for the future--is to evaluate options based on their composite ability to succeed in any possible future. That is, don't just pick what you think the most likely future scenario is and plan for that alone, but rather plan a solution that addresses all possible future scenarios simultaneously, prioritizing in order of probability. In particular, I think that today's conventional wisdom focuses entirely too much on how to hedge within what conventional wisdom considers to be very probable future scenarios (though I dispute their assumptions) without placing any concern on the ability of these plans to deal with outlying scenarios (such as Peak Oil, which I actually see as "probable," but which hasn't yet been fully accepted by the mainstream--more on this below).

I think that scenario planning, such as the more limited solution space proposed by Holmgren in futurescenarios.org, is a very important start in this direction. One point that Holmgren does an excellent job of addressing is the need to address this solution space on different levels. IF we could count on our national and global means of governance addressing our problems, then that could potentially be the best way to deal with the problems facing humanity. However, because human organization at that level seems unlikely to actually address our problems in any serious way due to temporary political demands and our inability to deal effectively with inherent uncertainty, it is important that Holmgren points out how it is also possible for communities and individuals to address our path into the future solution space. I take this even further--it is my opinion that we must begin to address the future solution space at the individual level, and that only once we have established a foundation of individual, resilient self-sufficiency in light of future uncertainty can we begin to build a community and then a global solution to our problems. This is because any attempt to solve problems without first addressing security at the individual level seems to leave humanity open to the lure of populist but illusory programs. Much more about this notion in The Problem of Growth.

----------------------------

I'd also like to briefly address the coverage of Peak Oil in the latest edition of The Economist. The Economist asks whether current high oil prices are caused by speculators or peak oil, and concludes that the answer is "neither." Addressing speculators, The Economist concludes rightly that the theory is "plain wrong." They provide an excellent and concise explanation of why, as I've explained here previously (essentially, that oil is a deliverable commodity and prices must ultimately be set by the consumer's willingness to pay a given amount). Next, they claim that "[t]here is little evidence to support the doctrine of "peak oil" in its extreme form." This, in itself, is an important qualification from previous statements by The Economist (and most others in the mainstream) that "peak oil" is flatly wrong. Instead, they only discount the "extreme form" of the theory (conveniently, without ever defining what differentiates "extreme" peak oil from "conventional" peak oil). Of course, they then proceed to offer up two completely unfounded arguments in support of their already unclear position. First, they claim that supply should rise in the near future due to current high prices (which is much different than showing significant extant increases), and second, they discount the "above ground" factors of increasing cost of production and resource nationalism as somehow divorced from peak oil, something that I've repeatedly (and I think convincingly) linked as a direct result of peak oil. I would like to see a more rigorous analysis from The Economist, but I guess this is what I should expect from a paper with such an ideological ax to grind. That said, I still enjoy reading The Economist because at least their ideological spin is so transparent that it is always easy to adjust for.

Guided Emergence

John Robb recently posed an interesting question at his blog, Global Guerrillas: is it possible to leverage decentralized decision making (in order to get inside your opponent’s OODA-Loop) while keeping the organization as a whole responsive to direction from above? In other words, can you leverage the power of decentralized decision making without ceding control to the mob? I think the answer is “partially yes.” Here’s my notion of how this can be done—and its limitations—something that I call “guided emergence.”

First, what is an OODA-Loop? It’s a topic mentioned by Robb, and one that I’ve written about many times in the past (1 2).

It’s the decision making cycle within any organization as defined by the steps Observe – Orient – Decide – Act. This is how the military—and any organization—processes information. We observe events, orient our goals and intentions to the changes that these observations represent, decide what to do about it, and then act on those decisions. When two opposing groups are in direct competition with each other—whether military or otherwise—the group that can go through the OODA-Loop process both correctly AND more quickly than their opponent prevails (or at least gains the upper hand). Now consider two opposing groups with two different organizational structures both competing in this OODA-Loop game. Group one (US military) is a huge, hierarchal bureaucracy. Group two is a small, decentralized network (al-Qa’ida). Group one’s attempts to go through the OODA-Loop process is bogged down by the information processing burden of hierarchy (see my writings on this topic in these three posts, as well as in Chapter 9 of A Theory of Power).

So that’s the shape of the problem: the US military can’t get inside al-Qa’ida’s OODA-Loop because it’s hierarchal, top-down decision making structure prevents it from executing the loop more quickly than its decentralized opponent. So back to Robb’s question: if the US military (or any other hierarchal organization) wants to speed up its OODA-Loop, can it do so while maintaining control of the organization? Robb presents two options. First, the US military can try to get all the decentralized decision makers to share the same objectives, the same understanding of acceptable means to pursue those objectives, and the same background information, and hope that they make decisions that are aligned with what a hierarchal decision making process would decide—only faster. The second option—one that is a priori unacceptable—is to let the decentralized decision makers do what they want without any control at all. This will invariably result in an even faster OODA-Loop because there is no need to waste time or resources attempting to get all decision makers in harmony with senior leadership (an impossible task in any event). Therefore, for the US military, the answer is “no,” it is not possible to fully leverage decentralized decision making to speed up our OODA-Loop. The best option that is both acceptable and implementable is to loosen the reigns of control over lower-level decision makers and provide some kind of training in advance that aims at harmonizing their actions within the acceptable range of senior leaders. We’ve been doing this for a long time already: military academies are intended, for example, to harmonize junior leaders with senior leadership to exactly this end, but they largely fail at this task because of their equally important task of generating junior leaders who are willing to think outside the box, innovate, and question authority when necessary. I’ll offer myself as case in fact for this problem—the best “harmonization training” available didn’t work. Because harmonization isn’t a real solution—just a stop gap (kind of like forming a “tiger team” to address a problem isn’t the same as addressing the problem)—an adversary who is not constrained by the need to “harmonize” decentralized decision makers will continue to operate inside the OODA-Loop of the US military. Hierarchy demands centralized decision making, and is fundamentally, structurally incompatible with decentralization of decision making beyond some boundary. Because the location of that boundary sets hierarchy at a permanent disadvantage to decentralized networks when it comes to speed of innovation and decision making, there is no solution to getting a hierarchal structure inside a decentralized structure’s OODA-Loop.

My solution to the problem is not to fight these fundamentals, but rather to change the structure of the larger organization to a decentralized one—what I call “rhizome.” I recognize that the US military just isn’t going to accept this—I think that’s fine, and I think it serves as an example of how the era of the Nation-State is in decline (see The New Map). I also recognize that the world is never going to convert to a wholly decentralized structure, a perfect “rhizome.” Likewise, this is not how structures exist in nature—nature is a dynamic balance between hierarchal and rhizomatic structures (see Manuel de Landa’s 1000 Years of Non-Linear History). So this leads me to what I consider the really interesting question here: how to effectively balance hierarchal structures with decentralized, rhizome structures. My answer: guided emergence. Use a limited hierarchy to create, reinforce, and maintain institutions that generate a balanced, minimally self-sufficient, harmonized rhizome structure and then “let it go”—accept that you can’t affect the direction of such a structure, but that because a balanced structure is created in the first place, the emergent actions of that structure will remain “harmonious.”

That’s a lot of fancy-sounding theory that probably comes off as gibberish. Let me run through three examples of this in action: guided emergence in biology, for a terrorist organization, for a national military (notice I’m not calling it a “Nation-State” military), and for a local community.

Guided Emergence in Biology

Guided emergence already exists in nature. As one example, consider DNA. That molecule effectively guides the emergence of a vast diversity of life while simultaneously ensuring its own propagation. Perhaps an even more interesting example is that of mitochondria, specifically mDNA. mDNA maintains its basic structure quite consistently (though not statically) while facilitating its own propagation through the dynamic, innovative system of carbon-based life. Talk about getting inside the opponent’s OODA-Loop. Sure, this is a pretty theoretical example, but one that’s worth keeping in mind as we move on to a very concrete example in human society next…

Guided Emergence and the Terrorist Organization

Al-Qa’ida already implements the theory of guided emergence in its organizational structure. Currently, al-Qa’ida’s senior leadership acts as a “doctrine center” as well as sometimes provider of training, direction, and financing. Al-Qa’ida does not, however, exert direct, hierarchal command and control of its forces in the field. In fact, it’s really impossible to say who al-Qa’ida’s forces are—some openly pledge allegiance, such as al-Qa’ida in Iraq or al-Qa’ida in the land of the Islamic Maghreb, but many more, perhaps most, are only influenced to some degree by the core function of al-Qa’ida. In this sense, al-Qa’ida is an excellent example of guided emergence operating successfully. It is also an excellent example of the reasons why traditional hierarchal structures such as the US Military are so incapable of adapting this highly efficient, highly innovative structure: the requirement to cede ultimate control of actions. Al-Qa’ida is limited, in “guiding” the emergence of a global Islamic jihad, to arguing why this jihad should be prosecuted, how this should be done, and on occasion directly interjecting personnel or training into the emergent system. This is also its strength—it can act symbolically, and greatly leverage its available resources by persuading others to directly act on, or roughly on, its behalf. It also forces al-Qa’ida to directly confront a prerequisite to ultimate political victory that is normally only given lip service by Nation-States in their pursuit of political-military victory: winning the hearts and minds. The US military, as others before it, is often lulled into thinking that winning hearts and minds is of secondary concern because direct application of military force can control the situation in the absence of control of hearts and minds. This tends to work well in the short term and disastrously over any much longer time period (witness: the very notion of “blowback” arises from this problem). Al-Qa’ida, by virtue of the fact that it does not and cannot directly control the kind of military force required to be tricked into this short-term perspective is forced to take a long-term approach that requires addressing hearts and minds first, and then looking for a military solution. While this allows temporary military setbacks such as the one it suffered in Afghanistan in 2001-2002, it ultimately leads to victory against an opponent who thinks that hearts and minds are an unnecessary sideshow. Hearts and minds will always, ultimately, be most attracted to an organization that permits unfettered, bottom-up innovation, because that directly allows the actual interests of people (as opposed to the theoretical interests advanced on their behalf by world aid organizations and “benevolent” Nation-States’ international policy programs) to dictate the actions of the emergent entity. It is very hard for a Nation-State to win hearts and minds when those hearts and minds realize that the Nation-State is not organically arising FROM them, but rather is attempting only to leverage them toward its own goals. A bottom-up, emergent organization doesn’t suffer from this weakness. This makes attempts to guide the emergence of such a bottom-up system—ultimately nothing more than an argument for why it is in THEIR best interests to follow the proposed course—so much more successful because it is inherently persuasive rather than coercive.

Guided Emergence and a National Military

So, given the problems of adapting a bottom-up, emergent, decentralized structure to a Nation-State military, is there no application of this kind of theory in the world of modern military affairs? I think that there is a very direct application, but that we must first remove “State” from “Nation-State” before attempting to apply guided emergence. “State” is an inherently centralized, hierarchal edifice erected (in theory, though never precisely in practice) upon the exact boundaries of an ethnic, religious, or cultural “Nation.” I’ve written before about the impossibility of erecting a state with Cartesian boundaries upon the inherently non-Cartesian space occupied by a Nation. However, if we dispense of “State,” it is very possible to apply a decentralized, emergent, bottom-up decision structure on a Nation’s military defense system. As I’ve discussed in “Defending Pala,” it is probably not possible to adapt this to a Nation’s offensive interests, but, that by confining the power of a Nation’s military to actual (as opposed to politically “spun”) operationally defensive engagement, the very problem of “blowback” and the current “need” for the very notion of “offensive defense” may be reduced or eliminated.

Guided Emergence and a Local Community

I find it interesting that John Robb has recently been applying much of his “global guerrillas” theory to local communities. I have long found this to be the foundational element of our post-Nation-State future, and think that developing a theory of guided emergence for local communities will pay great dividends. Communities may be the most appropriate place for guided emergence of minimally self-sufficient but cooperating and interacting individuals, families, and family groups to come together in the absence of some centralized, hierarchal structure organizing them. These communities, just like Nations in the Nation-State context, can function in a “guided emergence” environment with or without exclusive boundaries (where, for example, everyone in a geographic town may or may not participate in the guided emergence “game”). Traditional, hierarchal, and centralized “government-run” communities generally cannot function in this way, and therefore greatly inhibit the amount of innovation available to a community to essentially the “one organizational structure per geographic area” maximum. Guided emergence could, on the other hand, support multiple competing organizational schemes within a single geographic area (what might today be the boundaries of one “town”) without conflict arising—if people are drawn from one scheme to another, then it grows, but there would not necessarily (key word here—exclusive religious notions, as with al-Qa’ida, make motivation for conflict possible) be motivation to out-compete or eliminate other schemes.

It may be clear by now that this notion of guided emergence as applied to local communities nests nicely with my outline for resilient and self-sufficient communities from The Problem of Growth. It may be a bit difficult to understand outside that context. But consider the ability to use guided emergence to persuade, rather than coerce, others to pursue the exact program outlined in Problem of Growth: establish minimal self-sufficiency in extended family nodes (along with regionally-appropriate means of doing that, best practices, etc.), establish mutually beneficial but optional interaction between these nodes, drive innovation in both of these areas, and serve to advocate for collective courses of action that may require temporary leadership or that work best with greater unity of effort.

This may be the key benefit to guided emergence: to the extent that guided emergence is only available to bottom-up, decentralized organizations, and that these kinds of organizations are capable of getting inside the OODA-Loop of their centralized/hierarchal competitors or opponents, there exists a structural trend in favor of just these decentralized and bottom-up entities. I think that decentralized and bottom-up entities are more likely to be compatible with human ontogeny, to be environmentally sustainable, and to allow for resilience and diversity of practice within human society without oppression. Any theory that helps speed along the erosion of centralization and hierarchy and the rise of a decentralized replacement seems welcome in that context.

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The Problem of Growth

**Update: A unified and condensed version of "The Problem of Growth" is now up at The Oil Drum--readers may find the comments there of interest.

The fifth and final essay in "The Problem of Growth" is published (see links to all five essays below). This summary post is intended to place the series within the context of the problem it addresses, and will serve as an introduction to those who are getting to the party a bit late:

"The Problem of Growth" addresses what I see as the critical problem facing humanity: the structure of our civilization, its inherent need to grow (and therefore its unsustainability), and how we can fix the problem realistically. My proposed solution is, by definition, quite radical, because it rejects the prevalent problem-solving mechanism of modern technology: that we can use technology to continually mitigate the symptoms, rather than take the difficult (but, as I will argue, necessary) step of actually identifying and addressing the underlying problem.

Of course, it is certainly possible to "fix" the problem by continually developing more and better high technology "solutions" to each symptom of the underlying problem as it arises. This is what I call the "Roddenberry" solution, after the Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry. It consists of addressing symptoms through high-tech fixes, though it often claims to be addressing causes--in fact, it fails to either identify the underlying cause, or to address that underlying cause in any fundamental way.

It may be possible to successfully mitigate every symptom of our civilization's greatest problem as it arises through newer and shinier technology--we can, by definition, never know the truth of this proposition. I submit, however, that anyone who "believes" that it can or cannot happen is acting on faith, not reason. I personally view the potential for success of this "Roddenberry" proposition as very unlikely, primarily because success requires an unending streak of successes while failure simply requires failing to address any one key symptom; secondarily, I see this approach failing because I see most of the attempted "solutions" under the "Roddenberry" approach as actually contributing to the underlying problem; finally, I dislike this approach because the requisite faith in the technological solution necessary to believe that it will continue to work indefinitely, and not merely pass on a truly insurmountable problem to our grandchildren or great-great-grandchildren, seems eerily akin to some talking-sky-god religion. As Arthur C. Clarke noted in his Third Law, any sufficiently advanced technology [here, one that could continue to solve our problems indefinitely] is indistinguishable from magic.

That said, if we continually rely on technology to facilitate infinite growth on a finite planet, I think we're quite likely to be disappointed. I won't go so far as to say that "I know we'll fail" because that would rejecting the possibility that I'm wrong. Anyone who takes a position on this topic on faith--that is, anyone who "knows" that they're right or that I'm wrong--is, I suggest, acting irrationally. Even if you think it's very, very likely that technology and human innovation will continue to solve our problems, if you can't admit that there is a possibility that you're wrong, then you're just not being rational. If we can get people to rationally discuss the problems facing civilization (tall order, I admit), then I think we have a decent chance of solving them.

Below are links to each of the five essays in "The Problem of Growth" series:

Part 1: Hierarchy Must Grow, and is Therefore Unsustainable
Part 2: Hierarchy is the Result of Dependency
Part 3: Building an Alternative to Hierarchy: Rhizome
Part 4: Implementing Rhizome at the Personal Level
Part 5: Implementing Rhizome at the Community Level

Implementing Rhizome at the Community Level

This final essay in this five-part series, The Problem of Growth, looks at implementing rhizome at a community level. Rhizome does not reject community structures in favor of a “bunker mentality,” but rather requires community structures that embrace and facilitate the principles of rhizome at both the personal and community level. Ultimately a rhizome community is composed of rhizome individual or family nodes—participants who do not depend on the community for their basic survival, nor participants who expect to benefit from the community without contribution. Rather, both the individual and the community choose to participate with each other as equals in a non-zero-sum fashion.

The results-based focus of the community is essentially the same as the individual, because the community consists of individuals who recognize the ability of the community to help them build resiliency and self-sufficiency in the provision of their basic needs, as well as the ability to access a broader network beyond the community.

Water

The first thing that communities can do is to get out of the way of individuals’ attempts to create water self-sufficiency: remove zoning and ordinance hurdles that prevent people from practicing rainwater collection and storage, or that mandate people keep their front lawns watered. Communities can also address their storm water policies—many communities simply direct storm water into the ocean (see Los Angeles, for example), rather than effectively storing it in percolation ponds, or otherwise retaining it for community use. Communities can also facilitate the collection and sharing of water-collection and efficiency best practices, as well as help people to refine ideas from outside the community in a locally-appropriate manner. The possibilities are endless—as with virtually everything else here, the key is that the community recognize the issue and make a conscious effort to address it.

Food

Again, communities should start by getting out of the way of individuals’ attempts to become food self-sufficient. This means eliminating zoning or ordinances that require lawns instead of vegetable gardens, that prevent the owning of small livestock such as chickens in suburban developments, and even (!) that mandate the planting of non-fruit bearing trees (on the theory that they’re messy if you forget to harvest them). But communities can also have a very proactive role in facilitating food self-sufficiency. Community gardens are a great place to start, especially where people live in high density housing that makes individual gardening impracticable. This has been done to great effect in urban areas in Venezuela, for instance. Communities can also foster knowledge and facilitate the sharing of best practices via lecture series, master gardener courses, local gardening extensions, community college courses, or community seek banks for locally appropriate species. Finally, communities should consider encouraging farmers markets to promote local surplus produce, to promote at least regional food self-sufficiency, and to kindle a public appreciation for the quality and value of fresh, seasonal, locally grown foods.

Shelter, Heating, & Cooling

I see the actual implementation of self-sufficient shelters as primarily an individual concern, though communities should certainly consider making communal structure, schools, etc. that conform to these standards. Most significantly, however, communities can work to get government out of the way of people who wish to do so individually. Get rid of zoning requirements that forbid solar installations, graywater, rainwater catchment, or small livestock, or that mandate set-backs and minimum numbers of parking spaces. Pass laws or ordinances that eliminate Home Owners’ Association rules prohibiting vegetable gardens, that mandate lawns, that prevent solar installations, etc. Many Colorado Home Owners' Associations (HOAs) used to ban the installation of solar panels, but Colorado recently passed a statute that prevents HOAs from banning solar—seems like a good idea to me. The Colorado law certainly isn't perfect, but it is an example of a very real step that a few people can take to work with their local or state government to help make your community more self-sufficient. If your HOA prevents you from installing solar hot water (or other solar), why not try to get the HOA to change its rules--there may be many other neighbors who want the same thing, and the more self-sufficient your immediate neighbors, the stronger your community, even if that community is "suburbia." If your HOA won't change, follow Colorado's example.

Defense

As with individual defense, I don’t advocate that a community take a bunker mentality and make preparations for a Hizb’Allah style defense of South Lebanon. I think that could work, and I’ve written about it here, but I think it is the second to worst outcome and something to be avoided if possible. In modern America, it seems obvious to me that it is fully possible for a rhizome community to operate within the umbrella of any current state government, as well as the federal government. However, there are other nations—take Colombia for example—where this is probably not possible. It seems like a very real possibility that the permissive environment America currently enjoys could look much more like Colombia at some point in the future. For that reason, this is an issue that must be taken up on a case-by-case basis by local communities. While I certainly wouldn’t advocate an armed militia patrolling the perimeter of the self-sufficiency conscious town of Willits, California (though some American communities effectively do this already), this kind of “extreme” action may well be a basic requirement for a small village in Colombia that is attempting to institute localized self-sufficiency and rhizome structure.

Medicine, Entertainment, & Education

Communities have a myriad of ways to provide for their own entertainment, without resorting to some canned cable-TV product. Also, communities can address the specialized knowledge problems—education and medicine, as well as gardening, and the theory of rhizome, by ensuring that these topics are covered in local school curriculums at all levels (public and private), by making these kinds of learning resources available via a community college, the local library, a lecture series, etc.

Exchange, Information Processing, and Interaction Beyond the Local Community

The possibilities here are numerous, and I'll just name a few possibilities for consideration: Community currency, community paper or blog, community development micro-loans, sponsoring seasonal fairs or festivals, etc. This is an area ripe for innovation and the sharing of best-practices...for additional ideas, see "Going Local" by Michael Schuman.

Practical Considerations in Implementing Rhizome at the Community Level

Just as with implementing rhizome at the individual level, rhizome is not an all-or-nothing proposition for communities. Any step that makes it easier for individuals to move toward rhizome is beneficial. Every community’s situation is different, and the number of ways to combine just the few suggestions provided here is nearly limitless. Customize, come up with new solutions, adapt or reject these ideas as you see fit, and share what works (best practices) and what doesn't with the world in an open-source manner—but more than anything else, think about how to bring your community closer to rhizome, and then act.

Addressing Free-Riders

Finally, every community must address the problem of free riders. Some people will want to benefit from the community without contributing anything at all. In most cases, normative pressures will suffice, and this is especially true of rhizome, where there isn’t a grand redistributive scheme that facilitates some people to leach indefinitely off the collected surplus. Still, the problem will arise, and there will always be a need and a place for charity, within rhizome and elsewhere. The most important factor in determining who is worthy of charity and who is a free-rider is the conscious articulation of the requirements for membership: the community gains strength by helping up its least self-sufficient members, but it should do so by helping them to fish, rather than repeatedly just giving them fish to eat. Rhizome communities need not be heartless—in fact, they shouldn’t be heartless, not just on moral grounds, but on selfish grounds of building a more resilient community—but they should exert normative pressures to demand participation roughly commensurate with capability.

Conclusion

I hope that this five-part series addressing the Problem of Growth has been useful. One of the cornerstones of my personal philosophy that growth is the greatest challenge facing humanity, and that shifting from a hierarchal to a rhizome form of social organization is our best chance to “solve” that problem. I also think that rhizome is valuable as it is a scale-free solution: I think that it can help to solve our international and national problems, but even if that fails it can certainly improve our individual situations. Ultimately, removing ourselves, one at a time, from being part of the cause of humanities problem cannot be a bad thing. As Ghandi said, “be the change that you wish to see in this world.” That seems particularly applicable to a scale-free solution!

Further Reading: See John Robb's post The Resilient Community for another take on this topic.

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Implementing Rhizome at the Personal Level

This fourth essay in a five-part series, The Problem of Growth, examines practical steps to implement rhizome at the personal level. In the last installment, I argued for the theoretical requirements of rhizome. Rhizome begins at the personal level, with a conscious attempt to understand anthropological processes, to build minimal self-sufficiency, and to engage in “small-worlds” networks. This installment will outline my ideas for implementing this theory at the personal level in an incremental and practicable way. This is by no means intended to be an exhaustive list of ideas, but rather a starting point for discussion:

Water

In the 21^st Century, I think it will become clear that water is our most critical resource. We’ll move past our reliance on oil and fossil fuels—more by the necessity of resorting to dramatically lower consumption of localized energy—but we can’t move beyond our need for water. There is no substitute, so efficiency of use and efficacy of collection are our only options. In parts of the world, water is not a pressing concern. However, due to the fundamental and non-substitutable need for water everywhere, creating a consistent and resilient water supply should be a top priority everywhere. Climate change, or even just periodic extreme drought such as has recently hit the Atlanta area, may suddenly endanger water supplies that today may be considered a “sure thing.” How does the individual do this? I think that four elements are crucial: efficient use, resilient collection systems, purification, and sufficient storage.

Efficient use is the best way to maximize any available water supply, and the means to achieve this are varied: composting (no-flush) toilets, low-flow shower heads, mulching in the garden, etc. Greywater systems (also spelled "graywater," various spellings seem popular, so search on both) that reuse domestic water use in the garden are another critical way to improve efficiency.

Resilient collection systems are also critical. Rainwater harvesting is the best way to meet individual minimal self-sufficiency—dependence on a shared aquifer, on a municipal supply system, or on a riparian source makes your water supply dependent on the actions of others. Rainwater falling on your property is not (at least arguably not) dependent on others, and it can provide enough water to meet minimal needs of a house and garden in even the most parched regions with sufficient planning and storage. There are many excellent resources on rainwater harvesting, but I think Brad Lancaster’s series is the best—buy it, read it, and implement his ideas.

While dirty water may be fine for gardens, water purification may be necessary for drinking. Even if an existing water supply doesn’t require purification, the knowledge and ability to purify enough water for personal use with a solar still or via some other method enhances resiliency in the face of unforeseen events.

Storage is also critical. Rain, fortunately, does not fall continuously—it comes in very erratic and unpredictable doses. Conventional wisdom would have said that long-term storage wasn’t necessary in the Atlanta area because rain falls so regularly all year round that storage of only a few months supply would suffice. Recent events proved this wrong. Other areas depend on short, annual monsoon seasons for the vast majority of their rain (such as Arizona). Here, storage of at least one year’s water supply is a threshold for self-sufficiency, and more is desirable. Significant droughts and erratic rainfall mean the more storage the better—if you don’t have enough storage to deal with a drought that halves rainfall for two straight years, then you are forced back to dependency in such an event at exactly the worst time, when everyone else is also facing scarcity. Where to store water? The options here are also varied—cisterns are an obvious source for drinking water, as are ponds where it is a realistic option, but storage in the ground via swales and mulch is a key part of ensuring the water supply to a garden.

Food

If you have enough water and land, it should be possible to grow enough food to provide for minimal self-sufficiency. While many people consider this both unrealistic and extreme, I think it is neither. Even staunchly “establishment” thinkers such as the former chief of Global Strategy for Morgan Stanley advise exactly this path in light of the uncertainty facing humanity. There are several excellent approaches to creating individual food self-sufficiency: Permaculture (see Bill Mollison’s "Permaculture: A Designer’s Manual"), Masanobu Fukuoka’s “Natural Way of Farming” (see book of the same name), Hart’s “Food Forests,” and John Jeavons’ “Biointensive Method” (see "How to Grow More Vegetables"). Some combination and modification of these ideas will work in your circumstances. It is possible to grow enough calories to meet an individual’s requirements in only a few thousand square feet of raised beds—a possibility on even smaller suburban lots, and I have written about the ability to provide a culinarily satisfying diet on as little as 1/3 acre per person.

An additional consideration here is the need to make food supplies resilient in the face of unknown events. I have written about exactly this topic in “Creating Resiliency in Horticulture”, which basically advises to hedge failure of one type of food production with others that are unlikely to fail simultaneously—e.g. balance vegetable gardens with tree-crop production, mix animal production with the availability of reserve rangeland, or include a reserve of land for gathering wild foods. In Crete, after World War II, while massive starvation was wreaking Greece, the locals reverted to harvesting nutritious greens from surrounding forests to survive. The right mix to achieve food resiliency will vary everywhere—the key is to consciously consider and address the issue for your situation.

Shelter, Heating, & Cooling

Shelter should be designed to reduce or eliminate outside energy inputs for heating and cooling. This is possible even in the most extreme climates. Shelter should also be designed to eliminate reliance on building or maintenance materials that can’t be provided in a local and sustainable fashion. I realize that this is a challenge—but our architectural choices speak just as loudly about our real lifestyle as our food choices. Often, studying the architectural choices of pre-industrial people living in your region, or in a climatically similar region, provides great insight into locally appropriate architectural approaches. Passive solar heating and cooling is possible, with the right design, in virtually any climate—something that I have written about elsewhere.

Defense

I’m not going to advocate that individuals set up their own private, defensible bunker stocked with long rifles, claymore mines, and cases of ammunition. If that’s your thing, great. I do think that owning one or more guns may be a good idea for several reasons—defense being only one (hunting, good store of value, etc.). Let’s face facts: if you get to the point that you need to use, or threaten to use a lethal weapon to defend yourself, you’re A) already in serious trouble, and B) have probably made some avoidable mistakes along the way. The single best form of defense that is available to the individual is to ensure that your community is largely self-sufficient, and is composed of individuals who are largely self-sufficient. The entirety of part five of this series will address exactly that topic. Hopefully, America will never get to the point where lethal force must be used to protect your garden, but let’s face it, large parts of the world are already there. In either case, the single best defense is a community composed of connected but individually self-reliant individuals—this is rhizome. If your neighbors don’t need to raid your garden or “borrow” your possessions, then any outside threat to the community is a galvanizing force. More on this next time.

For now, aside from building a resilient community, there are a few things that individuals can do to defend their resiliency. First, don’t stand out. Hakim Bey’s notion of the permanent autonomous zone depends largely on staying “off the map.” How this manifests in individual circumstances will vary wildly. Second, ensure that your base of self-sufficiency is broad and minimally portable. At the risk of seeming like some wild-eyed “Mad Max” doom-monger, brigands can much more easily cart off wealth in the form of sheep or bags of cracked corn than they can in the form of almond trees, bee hives, or a well-stocked pond. Just think through how you achieve your self-sufficiency, and how vulnerable the entire system is to a single shock, a single thief, etc. You don’t have to believe that there will ever be roaming bands of brigands to consider this strategy—it applies equally well to floods, fire, drought, pestilence, climate change, hyperinflation, etc. My article “Creating Resiliency in Horticulture” also addresses this point.

Medicine, Entertainment, & Education

You don’t need to know how to remove your own appendix or perform open heart surgery. You don’t need to become a Tony-award caliber actor to perform for your neighbors. You don’t need to get a doctorate in every conceivable field for the education of your children. But if you understand basic first aid, if you can hold a conversation or tell a story, if you have a small but broad library of non-fiction and reference books, you’re a step ahead. Can you cook a good meal and entertain your friends? Look, human quality of life depends on more than just the ability to meet basic caloric and temperature requirements. The idea of rhizome is not to create a bunch of people scraping by with the bare necessities. Having enough food is great—you could probably buy enough beans right now to last you the next 10 years, but I don’t want to live that way. Most Americans depend on our economy to provide us a notion of quality of life—eating out, watching movies, buying cheap consumables. Minimal self-sufficiency means that we need the ability to provide these quality of life elements on our own. This probably sounds ridiculous to people in the third world who already do this—or to the lucky few in the “West” who have regular family meals, who enjoy quality home cooking, who can carry on enlightening and entertaining conversations for hours, who can just relax and enjoy the simplicity of sitting in the garden. It may sound silly to some, but for others this will be the single, most challenging dependency to eliminate. Again—dependency is the key. I’m not saying that you can never watch E! or go out to Applebee’s. What I am saying is that if you are so dependent on this method of achieving “quality of life” that you will enter the hierarchal system on its terms to access it, you have not achieved minimal self-sufficiency.

Production for Exchange

Finally, beyond minimal self sufficiency, the individual node should have the capability to produce some surplus for exchange because this allows access to additional quality-of-life creating products and services beyond what a single node can realistically provide entirely for itself. This is the point where minimal self-sufficiency doesn’t require isolationism. It is neither possible nor desirable for an individual or family node to provide absolutely everything desired for an optimal quality of life. While minimal self-sufficiency is essential, it is not essential to produce independently every food product, every tool, every type of entertainment, every service that you will want. Once minimal self-sufficiency is achieved, the ability to exchange a surplus product on a discretionary basis allows the individual node to access the myriad of wants—but not needs—that improve quality of life. This surplus product may be a food item—maybe you have 30 chickens and exchange the extra dozen or two eggs that you don’t consumer on a daily basis. Maybe you make wine, olive oil, baked bread, or canned vegetables. Maybe you provide a service—medicine, childcare & education, massage, who knows? The possibilities are endless, but the concept is important.

Practical Considerations in Implementing Rhizome at the Personal Level

Rhizome isn’t an all or nothing proposition—it is possible, and probably both necessary and desirable, to take incremental, consistent steps toward rhizome. Learn how to do more with less. Work to consciously integrate the principles of rhizome into every aspect of your daily life—think about your choices in consumption, then make medium and long-term plans to take bigger steps towards the full realization of rhizome.

And, perhaps most of all, rhizome does not demand, or even endorse, a “bunker mentality.” The single greatest step that an individual can take toward rhizome is to become an active participant in the creation of rhizome in the immediate, local community. That, of course, is the subject of the next, and final, installment in this series.

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Building an Alternative to Hierarchy: Rhizome Theory

This third essay in a five-part series, The Problem of Growth, looks at the theoretical requirements for a sustainable alternative to hierarchy. In the first two installments (1 2), I argued that competition between hierarchal entities selects for those entities that most efficiently grow and intensify, resulting in a requirement for perpetual growth, and that ongoing human dependency on participation in this system is the lifeblood of this process. At the most basic level, then, an alternative to hierarchy and a solution to the problem of growth must address this issue of dependency. My proposed alternative—what I call “rhizome”—begins at exactly this point.

Achieving Minimal Self-Sufficiency

The first principle of rhizome is that individual nodes—whether that is family units or communities of varying sizes—must be minimally self-sufficient. “Minimally self-sufficient” means the ability to consistently and reliably provide for anything so important that you would be willing to subject yourself to the terms of the hierarchal system in order to get it: food, shelter, heat, medical care, entertainment, etc. It doesn’t mean zero trade, asceticism, or “isolationism,” but rather the ability to engage in trade and interaction with the broader system when, and only when, it is advantageous to do so. The corollary here is that a minimally self-sufficient system should also produce some surplus that can be exchanged—but only to the extent that is found to be advantageous. A minimally self sufficient family may produce enough of its own food to get by if need be, its own heat and shelter, and enough of some surplus—let’s say olive oil—to exchange for additional, quality-of-life-enhancing consumables as it finds advantageous. This principle of minimal self-sufficiency empowers the individual family or community, while allowing the continuation of trade, value-added exchange, and full interaction with the outside world.

It should be immediately apparent that "dependency" is the result of one's definition of "need." Total self-sufficiency in the eyes of a Zimbabwean peasant, even outright luxury, may fall far short of what the average American perceives as "needing" to survive. As a result, an "objectively" self-sufficient American may sell himself into hierarchy to acquire what is perceived as a "need." To this end, what I have called "elegant simplicity" is a critical component of the creation of "minimal self-sufficiency." This is the notion that through conscious design we can meet and exceed our "objective" needs (I define these as largely experiential, not material, and set by our genetic ontogeny, not the global consumer-marketing system) at a level of material consumption that can realistically be provided for on a self-sufficient basis. I've written about this topic on several previous occasions (1 2 3 4 5).

Leveraging “Small-Worlds” Networks

How should rhizome nodes interact? Most modern information processing is handled by large, hierarchal systems that, while capable of digesting and processing huge amounts of information, incur great inefficiencies in the process. The basic theoretical model for rhizome communication is the fair or festival. This model can be repeated locally and frequently—in the form of dinner parties, barbecues, and reading groups—and can also affect the establishment and continuation of critical weak, dynamic connections in the form of seasonal fairs, holiday festivals, etc. This is known as the “small-worlds” theory of network. It tells us that, while many very close connections may be powerful, the key to flat-topography (i.e. non-hierarchal) communications is a broad and diverse network of distant but weak connections. For example, if you know all of your neighbors well, you will be relatively isolated in the context of information awareness. However, if you also have weak contact with a student in India, a farmer across the country, and your cousin in London, you will have access to the very different set of information immediately available to those people. These weak connections greatly expands information awareness, and leverages a much more powerful information processing network—while none of your neighbors may have experienced a specific event or solved a particular problem before, there is a much greater chance that someone in your diverse and distant “weak network” has.

In high-tech terms, the blogosphere is exactly such a network. While many blogs may focus primarily on cat pictures, there is tremendous potential to use this network as a distributed and non-hierarchal problem solving, information collection, and processing system. In a low-tech, or vastly lower energy world, the periodic fair or festival performs the same function.

Building Rhizome Institutions

The final aspect of the theory of rhizome is the need to create rhizome-creating and rhizome-strengthening institutions. One of these is the ability of rhizome to defend itself. Developments in fourth generation warfare suggest that, now more than ever, it is realistic for a small group or network to effectively challenge the military forces of hierarchy. However, it is not my intent here to delve into the a plan for rhizome military defense—I have explored that topic elsewhere, and strongly recommend John Robb’s blog and book “Brave New War” for more on this topic.

One institution that I do wish to explore here is the notion of anthropological self-awareness. It is important that the every participant node in rhizome has an understanding of the theoretical foundation of rhizome, and of the general workings of anthropological systems in general. Without this knowledge, it is very likely that participants will fail to realize the pitfalls of dependency, resulting in a quick slide back to hierarchy. I like to analogize anthropological self-awareness to the characters in the movie “Scream,” who were aware of the cliché rules that govern horror movies while actually being in a horror movie. When individual participants understand the rationale behind concepts like minimal self-sufficiency and “small-worlds” network theory, they are far more likely to succeed in consistently turning theory into practice.

Additionally, it is important to recognize the cultural programming that hierarchal systems provide, and to consciously reject and replace parts of this with a myth, taboo, and morality that supports rhizome and discourages hierarchy. Rules are inherently hierarchal—they must be enforced by a superior power, and are not appropriate for governing rhizome. However, normative standards—social norms, taboos, and values—are effective means of coordinating rhizome without resorting to hierarchy. For example, within the context of anthropological self-awareness, it would be considered “wrong” or “taboo” to have slaves, to be a lord of the manor, or to “own” more property than you can reasonably put to sustainable use. This wouldn’t be encoded in a set of laws and enforced by a ruling police power, but rather exist as the normative standard, compliance with which is the prerequisite for full participation in the network.

Finally, institutions should be devolutionary rather than accrete hierarchy. One example of this is the Jubilee system—rather than allow debt or excess property beyond what an individual can use, accumulate, and pass on to following generations--a system that inevitably leads to class divisions and a de facto aristocracy--some ancient cultures would periodically absolve all debt and start fresh, or redistribute land in a one-family-one-farm manner. These specific examples may not apply well to varying circumstances, but the general principles applies: cultural institutions should reinforce decentralization, independence, and rhizome, rather than centralization, dependency, and hierarchy.

Is This Setting the Bar Too High for All?

I’ll be the first to admit that this is a tall order. While the current system—massive, interconnected, and nested hierarchies and exchange systems—is anything but simple, its success is not dependent on every participant comprehending how the system works. While rhizome doesn’t require completely omniscient knowledge by all participants, the danger of hierarchy lurks in excessive specialization in the knowledge and rationale supporting rhizome—dependency on a select few to comprehend and operate the system is just that: dependency. Is it realistic to expect people to, en masse, understand, adopt, and consistently implement these principles? Yes.

I have no delusions that this is some perfect system that can be spread by airdropped pamphlet and then, one night, a switch is flipped and “rhizome” is the order of the day. Rather, I see this as the conceptual framework for the gradual, incremental, and distributed integration of these ideas into the customized plans of individuals and communities preparing for the future. I have suggested in the past that rhizome should operate on what Antonio Negri has called the “diagonal”-- that is, in parallel but out of phase with the existing, hierarchal system. There may also be lessons to be incorporated from Hakim Bey’s notions of the Temporary Autonomous Zone and the Permanent Autonomous Zone—that flying under the radar of hierarchy may be a necessary expedient. Ultimately, this will likely never be a system that is fully adopted by society as a whole—I tend to envision this as analogous, in some ways, to the network of monasteries that retained classical knowledge through the dark in Western Europe after the fall of the Roman Empire. In a low-energy future, it may be enough to have a small rhizome network operating in parallel to, but separated from, the remnants of modern civilization. Whether we experience a fast crash, a slow collapse, the rise of a neo-feudal/neo-fascist system, or something else, an extant rhizome network may act as a check on the ability of that system to exploit and marginalize the individual. If rhizome is too successful, too threatening to that system it may be imperiled, but if it is a “competitor” in the sense that it sets a floor and for how much hierarchal systems can abuse humanity, if it provides a viable alternative model, that may be enough to check hierarchy and achieve sustainability and human fulfillment. And, if this is all no more than wishful thinking, it may provide a refuge while Rome burns.

The final two installments in this series will address concrete and practicable steps that individuals and communities can take to erase dependencies and adapt a rhizome structure.

Suggested Further Reading: I've written several other essays on a rhizome structure for humanity: Envisioning a Hamlet Economy, Rhizome & Central Place Theory, Rhizome Communications, and Creating Resiliency & Stability in Horticulture.

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Hierarchy is the Result of Dependency

This second essay in a five-part series, The Problem of Growth, attempts to identify what causes and sustains hierarchies. Humanity has long been trapped in a cycle of treating the symptoms of hierarchy—here we will attempt to discern its cause in order to treat it directly.

The first installment in this series identified the reason why hierarchal human structures must grow: surplus production equals power, and entities across all scales must compete for this power—must grow—or they will be pushed aside by those who do. But why can’t human settlements simply exist as stable, sustainable entities? Why can’t a single family or a community simply decide to opt out of this system? The answer: because they are dependent on others to meet their basic needs, and must participate in the broader, hierarchal system in order to fulfill these needs. Dependency, then, is the lifeblood of hierarchy and growth.

Dependency Requires Participation on the Market’s Terms

Take, for example, a modern American suburbanite. Her list of dependencies is virtually unending: food, fuel for heat, fuel for transport, electricity, clothing, medical care, just to name a few. She has no meaningful level of self-sufficiency—without participation in hierarchy she would not survive. This relationship is hierarchal because she is subservient to the broader economy—she may have negotiating power with regard to what job she performs at what compensation for what firm, but she does not have negotiating power on the fundamental issue of participating in the market economy on its terms. She must participate to gain access to her fundamental needs—she is dependent (consider also Robert Anton Wilson's notion of money in civilization as "bio-surival tickets").

Compare this to the fundamentally similar situation of family in Lahore, Pakistan, or a farmer in rural Colombia. While their superficial existence and set of material possessions may be strikingly different, they share this common dependency. The Colombian farmer is dependent on a seed company and on revenue from his harvest to fuel his tractor, heat his home, and buy the 90% of his family's diet that he does not grow. The family in Lahore is dependent on the sales from their clothing store to purchase food—they cannot grow it themselves as they live in an apartment in a dense urban environment. They are dependent on participation in hierarchy—they cannot participate on their own terms and select for a stable and leisurely life. The market, as a result of competition between entities at all levels, functions to minimize input costs—if corn can be grown more cheaply in America and shipped to Colombia than it can be grown in Colombia, by a sufficient margin, then that will eventually happen. This requires the Colombian farmer to compete to make his corn as cheap as possible—i.e. to work as long and as hard to maximize his harvest. While if he were participating on his own terms, he may only wish to work 20 hours per week, he may have to work 50, 60, or more hours at hard labor to make enough money off competitively priced corn to be able meet the basic needs of his family in return. He is in competition with his neighbors and competing entities around the world to minimize the input cost of his own efforts—a poor proposition, and one that is forced upon him because he participates on the market’s terms, all a result of his dependency on the market to meet his basic needs. The situation of the family of shopkeepers in Pakistan or the Suburban knowledge-worker in America is fundamentally the same, even if it may vary on the surface.

The Blurring of Needs and Wants

Why not just drop out? It isn’t that tough to survive as a hermit, gather acorns, grow potatoes on a small plot of forest, or some other means of removing oneself from this dependency on the market. To begin with, “dropping out” and becoming self-sufficient is not quite as easy as it sounds, and just as importantly, it would become nearly impossible if any significant portion of the population chose that route. But more fundamentally, humans don’t want to drop out of participation in the market because they desire the enhanced consumption that is available—or at least exists in some far-off-promised land called “America” (fantasy even in the mind of most "Americans")—only through such participation. It may be possible to eat worms and acorns and sleep in the bushes, but this would be even more unacceptable than schlepping to work 40+ hours a week. Most people cannot envision, let alone implement, a system that maintains an acceptable “standard of living” without participation in the system, and all but the very lucky or brave few can’t figure out how to participate in that system without being dependent on it.

There is certainly a blurring of “needs” and “wants” in this dependency. Humans don’t “need” very much to remain alive, but a certain amount of discretionary consumption tends to increase the effectiveness of the human machine. From the perspective of the market, this is desirable, but is also an input cost that must be minimized. This is the fundamental problem of participating in the market, the economy, the “system” on its terms: the individual becomes nothing more than an input cost to be minimized in the competition between entities at a higher organizational level. John Robb recently explored this exact issue, but from the perspective of the local community--the implications are quite similar.

In an era of globalization, increased communications connectivity, and (despite the rising costs of energy) an ever increasing global trade network, this marginalization is accelerating at breakneck speed. Is your job something that can be done online from India? How about in person by an illegal immigrant? Because there are people with doctorates willing to work for ¼ what you make if you’re in a knowledge field, and people with high tolerance for mind-numbing, back-breaking labor willing to work hard for $5/hour or less right next door (or for $2/day overseas). If this doesn’t apply to you, you’re one of the lucky few (and, if I might add, you should be working to get yourself to into just such a position). Maybe they don’t know how to outsource your function yet, but trust me, someone is working on it. Participation in the market on its terms means that the market is trying to find a way to make your function cheaper.

This dependency on participation in the hierarchal system fuels the growth of hierarchy. Even if there is a severe depression or collapse, hierarchy will survive the demand destruction because it is necessary to produce and redistribute necessities to people who don’t or can’t produce them themselves. It may be smaller or less complex, but as long as people depend on participation in an outside system—whether that is a local strong man or an international commodities exchange—to gain access to basic necessities, the organization of that system will be hierarchal. And, as a hierarchy, that system will compete with other hierarchies to gain surplus, to grow, and to minimize the cost of human input.

Dependency on a Security Provider

One of the most significant areas in which people are dependent on hierarchal systems is to provide security. This seems to be especially true in times of volatility and change. While it may be possible to set up a fairly self-sufficient farm or commune and provide for one’s basic needs, this sufficiency must still be defended. If everyone doesn’t have access to the necessities that you produce for yourself, then there is potential for conflict. This could range from people willing to use violence to access to your food or water supply to governments or local strong-men expecting your participation in their tax scheme or ideological struggle. Ultimately, dependence on hierarchy is dependence on the blanket of security it provides, no matter how coercive or disagreeable it may be, and even if this security takes the form of “participation” in exchange for protection from the security provider itself.

Why this is Important

Virtually everyone is dependent on participation in hierarchal systems to meet their basic needs, of one type or another. This dependency forces participation, and drives the perpetual growth—and therefore the ultimate unsustainability—of hierarchy. If growth is the problem, then it is necessary to identify the root cause of that problem so that we may treat the problem itself, and not merely a set of symptoms. In our analysis, we have seen in Part 1 that hierarchies must grow, and now in this installment that human dependency is what sustains these hierarchies. Dependency, then, is the root cause of the problem of growth. In the next installment, we will develop a theory to remove dependency—and therefore to eliminate the growth imperative—while simultaneously maintaining, or improving, standard of living.

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Hierarchy must grow, and is therefore unsustainable

This first essay in a five-part series, The Problem of Growth, looks at hierarchal human systems and explains why their structures fundamentally demand continuous growth. The second installment will investigate what causes and sustains hierarchy. The third, fourth, and fifth installments will formulate an alternative to hierarchy that addresses its cause, not merely its symptoms, along with proposals to apply this alternative at both the personal and societal levels.

Why must hierarchy continually grow and intensify? Within the context of hierarchy in human civilization, there seem to be three separate categories of forces that force growth. I will address them in the order (roughly) that they arose in the development of human civilization:

Human Psychology Drives Growth

Humans fear uncertainty, and this uncertainty drives growth. Human population growth is partially a result of the desire to ensure enough children survive to care for aging parents. Fear also drives humans to accept trade-offs in return for security.

One of the seeds of hierarchy is the desire to join a redistribution network to help people through bad times—crop failures, drought, etc. Chaco Canyon, in New Mexico, is a prime anthropological example of this effect. Most anthropologists agree that the Chaco Canyon dwellings served as a hub for a food redistribution system among peripheral settlements. These peripheral settlements—mostly maize and bean growing villages—would cede surplus food to Chaco. Drought periodically ravaged either the region North or South of Chaco, but rarely both simultaneously. The central site would collect and store surplus, and, when necessary, distribute this to peripheral settlements experiencing crop failures as a result of drought. The result of this system was that the populations in peripheral settlements were able to grow beyond what their small, runoff-irrigated fields would reliably sustain. The periodic droughts no longer checked population due to membership in the redistributive system. The peripheral settlements paid a steep price for this security—the majority of the surplus wasn’t redistributed, but rather supported an aristocratic priest class in Chaco Canyon—but human fear and desire for security made this trade-off possible.

Still today, our fear of uncertainty and desire for stability and security create an imperative for growth. This is equally true of Indian peasants having seven children to ensure their retirement care as it is of rich Western European nations offering incentives for couples to have children in order to maintain their Ponzi-scheme retirements systems. Fear also extends to feelings of family or racial identity, as people all over the world fear being out-bred by rival or neighboring families, tribes, or ethnic groups. This phenomenon is equally present in tribal societies of Africa, where rival ethnic groups understand the need to compete on the level of population, as it is in America, where there is an undercurrent of fear among white Americans that population growth rates are higher among Hispanics Americans.

The Structure of Human Society Selects for Growth

The psychological impetus toward growth results in what I consider the greatest growth-creating mechanism in human history: the peer-polity system. This phenomenon is scale free and remains as true today as it did when hunter-gather tribes first transitioned to agricultural “big-man” groups. Anthropologically, when big-men groups are often considered the first step toward hierarchal organization. When one farmer was able to grow more than his neighbors, he would have surplus to distribute, and these gifts created social obligations. Farmers would compete to grow the greatest surplus, because this surplus equated to social standing, wives, and power. Human leisure time, quite abundant in most ethnological accountings of remnant hunter-gatherer societies, was lost in favor of laboring to produce greater surplus. The result of larger surpluses was that there was more food to support a greater population, and the labors of this greater population would, in turn, produce more surplus. The fact that surplus production equates to power, across all scales, is the single greatest driver of growth in hierarchy.

In a peer-polity system, where many separate groups interact, it was not possible to opt-out of the competition to create more surplus. Any group that did not create surplus—and therefore grow—would be out-competed by groups that did. Surplus equated to population, ability to occupy and use land, and military might. Larger, stronger groups would seize the land, population, and resources of groups that failed in the unending competition for surplus. Within the peer-polity system, there is a form of natural selection in favor of those groups that produce surplus and grow most effectively. This process selects for growth—more specifically, it selects for the institutionalization of growth. The result is the growth imperative.

The Development of Modern Economics & Finance Requires Growth

This civilizational selection for growth manifests in many ways, but most recently it resulted in the rise of the modern financial system. As political entities became more conscious of this growth imperative, and their competition with other entities, they began to consciously build institutions to enhance their ability to grow. The earliest, and least intentional example is that of economic specialization and centralization. Since before the articulation of these principles by Adam Smith, it was understood that specialization was more efficient—when measured in terms of growth—than artesian craftsmanship, and that centralized production that leveraged economy of place better facilitated growth than did distributed production. It was not enough merely to specialize “a little,” because the yardstick was not growth per se, but growth in comparison to the growth of competitors. It was necessary to specialize and centralize ever more than competing polities in order to survive. As with previous systems of growth, the agricultural and industrial revolutions were self-reinforcing as nations competed in terms of the size of the infantry armies they could field, the amount of steel for battleships and cannon they could produce, etc. It wasn’t possible to reverse course—while it may have been possible for the land area of England, for example, to support its population via either centralized or decentralized agriculture, only centralized agriculture freed a large enough portion of the population to manufacture export goods, military materiel, and to serve in the armed forces.

Similarly, the expansion of credit accelerated the rate of growth—it was no longer necessary to save first buy later when first home loans, then car loans, then consumer credit cards became ever more prevalent, all accelerating at ever-faster rates thanks to the wizardry of complex credit derivatives. This was again a self-supporting cycle: while it is theoretically possible to revert from a buy-now-pay-later system to a save-then-buy system, the transition period would require a significant period of vastly reduced spending—something that would crush today’s highly leveraged economies. Not only is it necessary to maintain our current credit structure, but it is necessary to continually expand our ability to consume now and pay later—just as in the peer polity conflicts between stone-age tribes, credit providers race to provide more consumption for less buck in an effort to compete for market share and to create shareholder return. Corporate entities, while existing at least as early as Renaissance Venice, are yet another example of structural bias toward growth: corporate finance is based on attracting investment by promising greater return for shareholder risk than competing corporations, resulting in a structural drive toward the singular goal of growth. And modern systems of quarterly reporting and 24-hour news cycles only exacerbate the already short-term risk horizons of such enterprises.

Why This is Important

This has been a whirlwind tour of the structural bias in hierarchy toward growth, but it has also, by necessity, been a superficial analysis. Books, entire libraries, could be filled with the analysis of this topic. But despite the scope of this topic, it is remarkable that such a simple concept underlies the necessity of growth: within hierarchy, surplus production equates to power, requiring competing entities across all scales to produce ever more surplus—to grow—in order to compete, survive, and prosper. This has, quite literally, Earth shaking ramifications.

We live on a finite planet, and it seems likely that we are nearing the limits of the Earth’s ability to support ongoing growth. Even if this limit is still decades or centuries away, there is serious moral hazard in the continuation of growth on a finite planet as it serves merely to push that problem on to our children or grandchildren. Growth cannot continue infinitely on a finite planet. This must seem obvious to many people, but I emphasize the point because we tend to overlook or ignore its significance: the basis of our civilization is fundamentally unsustainable. Our civilization seems to have a knack for pushing the envelope, for finding stop-gap measures to push growth beyond a sustainable level. This is also problematic because the further we are able to inflate this bubble beyond a level that is sustainable indefinitely, the farther we must ultimately fall to return to a sustainable world. This is Civilization’s sunk cost: there is serious doubt that our planet can sustain 6+ billion people over the long term, but by drawing a line in the sand, that “a solution that results in the death of millions or billions to return to a sustainable level” is fundamentally impermissible, we merely increase the number that must ultimately die off. Furthermore, while it is theoretically possible to reduce population, as well as other measures of impact on our planet, in a gradual and non-dramatic way (e.g. no die off), the window of opportunity to choose that route is closing. We don’t know how fast—but that uncertainty makes this a far more difficult risk management problem (and challenge to political will) than knowing that we have precisely 10, 100, or 1000 years.

This is our ultimate challenge: solve the problem of growth or face the consequences. Growth isn't a problem that can be solved through a new technology--all that does is postpone the inevitable reckoning with the limits of a finite world. Fusion, biofuels, super-efficient solar panels, genetic engineering, nano-tech--these cannot, by definition, solve the problem. Growth is not merely a population problem, and no perfect birth control scheme can fix it, because peer polities will only succeed in reducing population (without being eliminated by those that outbreed them) if they can continue to compete by growing overall power to consumer, produce, and control. All these "solutions" can do is delay and exacerbate the Problem of Growth. Growth isn't a possible problem--it's a guaranteed crisis, we just don't know the exact time-frame.

Is there a solution to the Problem of Growth? Can global governance lead to an agreement to abate or otherwise manage growth effectively? It's theoretically possible, but I see it about as likely as solving war by getting everyone to agree to not fight. Plus, as the constitutional validity and effective power of the Nation-State declines, even if Nation-States manage to all agree to abate growth, they will fail because they are engaged in a very real peer-polity competition with non-state groups that will only use this competitive weakness as a means to establish a more dominant position--and continue growth. Others would argue that collapse is a solution (a topic I have explored in the past), but I now define that more as a resolution. Collapse does nothing to address the causes of Growth, and only results in a set-back for the growth-system. Exhaustion of energy reserves or environmental capacity could hobble the ability of civilization to grow for long periods of time--perhaps even on a geological time scale--but we have no way of knowing for sure that a post-crash civilization will not be just as ragingly growth-oriented as today's civilization, replete with the same or greater negative effects on the environment and the human spirit. Similarly, collapse that leads to extinction is a resolution, not a solution, when viewed from a human perspective.

A solution, at least as I define it, must allow humans to control the negative effects of growth on our environment and our ability to fulfill our ontogeny. The remaining essays in this series will attempt to identify the root cause of the problem of growth, and to propose concrete and implementable solutions that satisfy that definition.

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Will Peak Oil Drive Relocalization?

Over the past week, Stuart Staniford and Sharon Astyk have written thought-provoking essays at The Oil Drum on the nexus of Peak Oil and relocalization, with Staniford suggesting that peak oil will not result in relocalization of agriculture because the industrialization of agriculture is a more efficient use of energy and is not practicably reversible, and Astyk rebutting that idea. I think that both essays make important points, but I would like to offer a third perspective: that we have insufficient information to reach a conclusion about when energy scarcity will result in relocalization of agriculture, but that we will likely cross this threshold in the not-too-distant future and should prepare accordingly.

Astyk’s main critique of Staniford’s essay is, while important, focused primarily on the somewhat dismissive and partisan language of “reversalism.” I agree with this critique, and will not rehash it here. This critique does not, however, address the core of Staniford’s argument that centralization and hierarchal organization in agriculture will stabilize or intensify in the face of rising energy prices.

In my view, the primary weakness of Staniford’s analysis is the hidden substitution of causation for correlation in the body of his argument. My own writings have often been criticized as lacking in scientific analysis of hard data, and I accept that as the price of trying to approach causation directly. Graphs of data points, such as those dominating Staniford’s analysis, can clearly convey correlation with some causal mechanism—say an increasing linear function—but do nothing to establish that causal relationship itself. These graphs do nothing to establish a causal relationship between, to use Staniford’s examples, labor per acre or profit margin per acre and oil price. It could be pure coincidence that they appear positively correlated, much like the Virgin Mary on a piece of toast. As importantly, such correlations provide no insight as to whether the current correlative relationship will continue as oil prices increase—a small segment of a linear function, an exponential function, or a parabolic function may all fit this correlation, yet diverge wildly at later points. Here's an example: a graph showing the driving fatalities by age for 13 to 17 year olds will show a remarkable positive correlation between higher deaths at higher ages. The implied causality in such a graph is that aging causes driving fatalities. Of course, with the benefit of a much broader perspective, additional data showing that driving fatalities begin to decline significantly after roughly the age of 25, and the knowledge that (in the U.S.) one can get a license to drive at age 16, an alternate likely causality arises. This is, essentially, my critique of Standiford's argument--that while correlation may suggest causation on the very limited data set available to us, we really don't gain any insight into what will happen--or what form of agriculture will be most efficient--at oil prices equivalent to $200, $300, or more dollars per barrel. At risk of pushing too far into the philosophical, Staniford's analysis places us in the equivalent of Plato's cave where all we can see is the 13-17 year segment of the driving fatality graph. I won’t belabor this point any further—Scottish philosopher David Hume said this far better than I could if anyone cares to delve deeper into this line of thought.

Suffice it to say that, if we reject this substitution of causation for correlation, we’re left with Staniford’s rather bald conclusion that “industrial farmers are extremely efficient, and there is no way to compete with them except by becoming one” based solely on the presumptive correlation between various agricultural data in very recent history with historical oil prices. I don’t find that convincing, but Staniford must be given his due—he presents a plausible case, and certainly one that doesn’t disprove itself.

I think that the best way to approach this problem is to try to locate actual causal relationships that either A) make centralization and hierarchy more efficient means of organizing agriculture in the face of rising energy prices, or B) make decentralization a more efficient means of organizing agriculture in the face of rising energy prices:

A. Why would centralization of agriculture increase efficiency?

1. Economy of place: It is more efficient to grow oranges in Florida than in a heated greenhouse in upstate New York (or, to use the classic example, wine in Portugal than in England).
2. Economy of scale: It is more efficient for one man to grow ten orange trees than ten men to each grow one for a variety of reasons.
3. Specialization of knowledge processes: A contributor to #2 above, but particularly important in the era of increasingly scientific and knowledge intensive farming—farmers can afford to specialize in farming, whereas people who are only part-time farmers cannot to the same degree.
4. Justification for intensive capital expenditure: An industrial farmer can justify the expense of a complex combine harvester that automates processes, whereas a small holder may not be able to.

B. Why would decentralization of agriculture increase efficiency?

1. Transportation & operation cost: decentralized farming has the potential to require transportation over shorter distances to market than centralized farming, and therefore less embodied energy cost. Likewise, tractors and combines use oil, whereas hoeing and hand weeding do not.
2. Superior suitability for sustainable operation: for now, decentralized agriculture seems more capable of maintaining topsoil and is more adaptable to varying water regimes.
3. Greater resiliency to black swan & gray sway events: decentralized agriculture is less susceptible to terrorism, is more likely to incorporate the biodiversity necessary to overcome disease, and may be more adaptable in the face of global warming.
4. Less exposure to capital cost creep: decentralized agriculture is less dependent on expensive machinery that is subject to increasing cost as the cost of manufacture and raw materials increase.

There are undoubtedly many more reasons on both sides—the intent here is to set up the following balancing problem, not to present an exhaustive list.

It becomes apparent that resolving the centralization vs. decentralization of agriculture dispute requires balancing these factors—more specifically, balancing these factors at a given cost of energy. I don’t think that it can be reasonably disputed that, at some cost of energy, it is more efficient to centralize agriculture.* As a hypothetical, if energy is free, there is no substantive barrier to total centralization of all agriculture. Likewise, I don’t think it can be reasonably disputed that, at some cost of energy, it is more efficient to decentralize agricultural production. As a hypothetical, if energy is so expensive as to be totally use-prohibitive to all parties (e.g. nothing but human labor is available), then centralization that requires food transportation of a greater distance than a human can walk before the food spoils, or that requires more calories for a human to transport to market than the cargo contains, is infeasible. Obviously, we are faced with the challenge of balancing centralization vs. decentralization for some real cost of energy between free and use-prohibitive.

This analysis also confronts some significant knowledge gaps. Centralized agriculture is currently engaged in practices that are widely considered non-sustainable. Industrial farming practices are rapidly depleting topsoil and rely on non-renewable chemical inputs. Conversely, methods of decentralized agriculture exist that are widely considered fully sustainable—permaculture, Fukuoka method, and John Jeavon’s biointensive method, just to name a few. It may well be possible to adopt industrial-scale methods that are equally sustainable, but the efficiency loss in doing so is unknown. It seems unfair to compare an unsustainable method with a sustainable one, but no data currently exists sufficient to bridge this gap. Another factor to be addressed is the opportunity cost of time spent in decentralized agriculture/horticulture. If there are abundant opportunities to earn high wages relative to food costs—something true in today’s Western economies, but uncertain at best in a future scenario of $300/barrel oil—then the opportunity cost of spending personal time laboring in a garden weighs heavily against decentralized agriculture. However, if there is massive unemployment and it isn’t possible for most to earn enough to buy necessary food due to the embodied cost of energy inputs, then it is more rational to spend time gardening no matter how efficient centralized agriculture is.

Furthermore, it is necessary to consider the sunk cost and subsidies supporting centralized agriculture. Just two examples:

- The trillion dollar infrastructure of highways necessary to support our centralized system has already been paid for (well, is still being paid for in many respects) whereas decentralized agriculture has no trillion dollar head start. This infrastructure is supported by ongoing maintenance paid for via distributed taxes, not by tax attached to the price of food or collected from individual farmers. At some cost of energy, maintaining such a system is no longer practicable, erasing this current advantage for centralized agriculture.

- The existing urbanization of America (just to cite one example) makes gardening impracticable for many, and is a relic of cheap food and the inexpensive transportation network capable of supporting urbanization. There is a great reluctance to relocate for the purpose of making gardening affordable now, but at some theoretical cost of food there is a tipping point where people would stream to small holdings, dramatically erasing this current advantage for centralized agriculture.

Hopefully I have highlighted the methodological difficulties in determining whether centralized or decentralized agriculture is more efficient at a given price of oil we have not yet reached—and therefore whether this historical process is likely to be “reversible” at some price. I’d love to tell you that, at $254/barrel, society will tip from centralized to decentralized agriculture. Clearly I can’t do that, and I submit that there is insufficient data for anyone to do so at this time (or, to demonstrate that the same won’t happen). What I will suggest is that it seems clear to me that, at some price of oil, decentralized agriculture will be more efficient. Price may actually be misleading on this point—if one accepts a general energy descent future (which I realize is a big *IF* for many), then demand destruction may prevent prices of energy from continuing forever upward. In such a scenario it will actually be “at some availability of surplus energy” where decentralization becomes more efficient. If one extrapolates any of the various gloomier future scenarios for world energy production often presented it seems very possible that this threshold may be crossed within a generation or two. And, when we reach this threshold, those who have prepared or transitioned early will be better situated. There are, without doubt, vast uncertainties here, but the precautionary principle suggests that we prepare for the possibility that this point comes sooner rather than later. Finally, I would suggest that there are benefits of decentralized agriculture that reach beyond mere calculations of price, profit, and meeting minimal nutrition requirements (see notes below). There are, after all, reasons why people go on vacation to Tuscany instead of Kansas.**

* What are our goals—is it merely to meet our minimal nutritional requirements, or to amass the most material possessions? Who benefits from centralized processes vs. decentralized, and what political structures to they tend to support and accrete? Are we seeking to maximize the mean or median fulfillment of human ontogeny? These are ultimately moral and philosophical questions, and ones that I will not attempt to answer here. I do, however, wish to draw the reader’s attention to the complexities raised by trying to address this dilemma while simultaneously balancing the benefits of centralization and decentralization. For more on centralization vs. decentralization, consider my essay “A Theory of Power.”

** For a discussion of Tuscan hill towns as a mode of decentralized coordination, consider my essay “The Hamlet Economy.”

What is Rhizome?

Rhizome takes it name from plants such as bamboo, aspen, or ginger that spread via a connected underground root system. As metaphor, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari used rhizome to refer to a non-hierarchal form of organization. I have extended this metaphor, refering to rhizome as an alternative mode of human organization consisting of a network of minimally self-sufficient nodes that leverage non-hierarchal coordination of economic activity. The two keys concepts in my formulation of rhizome are 1) minimal self-sufficiency, which eliminates the dependencies that accrete hierarchy, and 2) loose and dynamic networking that uses the "small worlds" theory of network information processing to allow rhizome to overcome information processing burdens that normally overburden hierarchies.

Rhizome operates as the central metaphor of this blog, connecting the diverse themes of energy & peak oil (arguing that a rhizomatic organization is the most practicable solution to low-energy social coordination), geopolitics & terrorism (as emergent non-state actors tend to embody many of rhizome's organizational principles), to philosophy (arguing that rhizomatic organization is more compatible with humanity's genetic ontogeny than the currently dominant hierarchal mode).

Several posts that elaborate on the application of rhizome to human systems include:

1. Problem of Growth. A capstone formulation of why our societal structure is unsustainable, how rhizome presents a solution, and how to implement it.

2. Envisioning a Hamlet Economy. Big-picture concpetion of how a rhizome economy will function.

3. Creating Resiliency and Stability in Horticulture. A more detailed analysis of how to implement a hybrid-horticultural scheme at the level of the rhizome node.

4. Rhizome & Central Place Theory. In response to a comment, a more detailed discussion of how rhizome can grow amidst existing hierarchal structures.

5. Rhizome Network Defense. A review of a Cambridge team's analysis of potential tacticts to defend rhizome structures against hierarchy.

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Back to Rhizome for a moment...

I haven't said much on the topic of rhizome for some time (though I've certainly been thinking about it). This link to a piece at Brainsturbator isn't new, but it's well worth reading. See my rhizome link page (as well as, of course, A Theory of Power) for my writing on the topic...

Social Networking & “Small-Worlds” Theory

“Social Networking” is more than just a virtual party-coordination-system. It’s big business, and the rapid success of profession-networking site LinkedIn is leading the way. As a long-time writer on the theory of non-hierarchal networks, what I call "rhizome," I’ve decided to throw my hat in the ring and join LinkedIn. So now that I’m there, what do I do? Conventional wisdom says to add your close associates to your network, and then expand outward in some logical manner by leveraging their network connections, gradually building a large and powerful network of contacts.

The “Small-Worlds” theory of networks, however, suggests a very different approach. According to this theory of organization, which I first wrote about in my 2004 book “A Theory of Power,” the true leverage in tying together a vast network lies in weak and distant connections. Borrowing an example from Mark Buchanan’s “Nexus: Small Worlds and the Groundbreaking Theory of Networks,” I stated:

“If…ten students had started some rumor that moved only between the best friends, it would have infected their own social group, but not much more. In contrast, a rumor moving along weaker links would go much farther (to more diverse social groupings). As in the case of people seeking jobs, information spreading along weak ties has a better chance to reach a large number of people.”

Figure 1: Network topology graphic demonstrating the power of “weak” connections

From a social networking perspective, effort spent cultivating “near” connections online may be a waste—that is more properly the province of “real-world” connections, and doesn’t leverage the power of social networking systems (though capturing these existing “near” connections in a virtual context is critical). Effort spent cultivating “distant” contacts may yield the greatest reward. Perhaps the best measure of value from a “small-worlds” perspective is how FEW second or third-level connections two people share--a few distant contacts can span network space more efficiently, as fewer signal-distorting relays are required to connect any two nodes. Of course, just connecting to some random and “distant” person is of little value, as there is little weight behind recommendations or introductions, nor much incentive to provide the same. However, when the opportunity arises to make a “distant” connection, effort spent maintaining and deepening that connection is time well spent.

My Linkedin Profile

Rhizome Theory Posts

A compilation of past posts that discuss elements of rhizome theory:

Envisioning a Hamlet Economy
Creating Resiliency in Horticulture
Rhizome & Central Place Theory
Swarming
Rhizome Military Ops
Rhizome Defense
Rhizome & Secrecy