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.

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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