Tokyo Babylon

There has to be a better word for going back to an older way of doing things but doing it from a position of increased knowledge and understanding. The question then is what would you call that way of doing things. Mostly what I am thinking about here is agriculture, how we get our food and raw materials and the tiny sliver of genetic goodness that we get our food from.

You see mostly we get our food from annual crops which means we’ve got to sow, weed, tend and harvest. But there other plants out there called perennials, which produce year after year after year without the need to sow, weed or tend very much.

It occurs to me that a plant that builds it’s infrastructure, roots, leaves etc in the first year and then reuses it over and over again is probably going to be more efficient than a plant that dies at the end of the year, leaving only seeds to rebuild everything all over again from scratch. Now because it has to do everything from scratch and do it quickly that seed has a lot of energy in it, and its that energy that we use to make our bread and pasta. That’s how it’s been explained to me in books and it makes sense to me, even though I wouldn’t know millet from sorghum. It also makes sense to me that the way we grow food isn’t filling all the biological niches. You see different plants have roots at different levels, they take different nutrients from the soil, they like exposure to light at different levels, they grow and flower at different times of the year, some of them put nutrients into the soil and some take them out, some work in harmony with the fungi that makes glomalin, some attract pests and some repel pests. A field of wheat takes all that growth potential, all that space and uses only a very small percentage of it. So the next time you look at a field of wheat imagine it as a factory building with all the production machinery stuffed into one corner with the rest of the floor space empty.

There’s also the notion that an annual only has so much time to build its infrastructure. If you were a builder and were told you only had six months to build something, well you’re not going to try and build the Empire State Building, are you? So what you get is the natural equivalent of urban sprawl, miles after mile of simple low plant density. That’s the Green Revolution for you.

Now imagine a paddy field filled with rice. Before the Green Revolution that paddy field would have had more than just bowl of rice in it, it would have had fish suppers and frogs legs. Then along came the green revolution. You have to spray green revolution rice, but then there’s no more fish suppers and frog legs. But farm planners don’t tally up the fish suppers and frogs legs they’re only concerned with counting the rice. So in a field you have space for plants, that I’ve already talked about but you also have space for animals, each of which had it’s own niche before it pesticides and herbicides wiped them out.

Right now farming in this way is a bit like American afternoon TV, it’s dumb as hell and you don’t get much from it.

What’s the alternative you might ask?

The alternative is as different from conventional farming as a Pentium 4 is to a 286; anyone remember those?

You see when you design a landscape to meet mans needs by filling every available ecological niche then you get something wondrous; you get a forest. Now ask most people what you get from a forest and some will say the fire that burned my house down, others will say furniture and paper. But an open forest that lets light in all the way down to the ground is farming in 3 dimensions, instead of 2. Under those conditions it’s possible to take the width and breadth of your growing area and multiply it by adding depth. It’s called a forest garden.

So let’s say you have tree like Moringa

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moringa_oleifera

It’s basically a vegetable field that grows vertically. Its leaves are edible, as is its fruit. It also produces oil and medicines. So that’s one plant in your new style field, but because it grows upwards and not outwards you’ve still got space and light for other plants. You’ve also got multiple products there as well. Now that you’ve got your trees spaced out in your field, you’ll want something to grow on them, like a liana. Cat’s Claw is a useful climbing plant, it’s medicinal in a big way. Kudzu , the ‘the plant that ate the south’ is another perennial that’s edible and has medicinal properties though I am sure there are many more. So now you’ve got your trees holding the soil together and gently, not densely shading it. The Moringa can grow as high as 10 metres, so either you keep them short or you build an elevated walkway. Keep in mind you’ve basically still got the tall bush level, the short bush level and then ground level, after that you’ve got your sub ground level, like mushroom patches. Some plants you’d put in to provide nitrogen to the soil, some plants you put in to repel insects. You could do worse than to have a Neem Tree in there as well.

Because everything’s maturing at different times you have work all year round. You also don’t have weeds because weeds fill empty spaces and in this designed space there are none. You don’t need to sow, because you’ve already built it. It’s basically just collecting; a hunter gatherer existence in the 21st century but different from the hunter gatherer experience in a supermarket. . On the other hand you’re getting vegetables, fruit, timber, oil, medicines, building materials, mushrooms all from the one field. Additionally you could have bees, muskovy ducks, chickens and off field livestock to eat that which you can’t.

I really want to try and create this self sustaining environmental factory and have it next to my self sustaining self powered house and my electric car. I’d probably only be a part time hunter gatherer, but I’d have a cushion against almost anything you could throw at me by this point. Now link this to Terra Preta..

Why am I talking about this? Because I want to do something once and get continuing returns. I also want to increase biodiversity at the same time. If I could get it up and running I’d have the ability to buy marginal land and rehabilitate it. The trick is to make it so that nature does most of the work and I think this is one way to do it.

So what would we call this kind of existence? Hunter Gather?

Perhaps idyllic would be a better description.

When I was studying at Yonsei Graduate School another student, from just below the Mason Dixie line would try and mock me with these words, “He’s looking out for the little man.”, whenever I made my opinion known. My opinions which I deliver to you in my own stream of consciousness plain speaking style, hopefully void of condescension, haven’t changed much in the intervening years, so perhaps you, more than I, know what he was objecting to. He seemed to believe he was scoring points off me every time he brayed it out.

His attitude puzzled me then, as it puzzles me now, since he wasn’t a rich kid, nor was he from a rich family. I wonder now, as I wondered then, why he thought big capitalist interests needed defending. It seemed to me somewhat like a man defending vampires while his shirt collar turns crimson.

Now don’t get me wrong, I’m all for business and unlike many environmentalists you might come across while out hugging trees, I think the solutions to our problems lies in altering the way we make things, the way we make money from things, and how we manage energy and material flows in our economies. So, any way you look at it there’s really only two groups; consumers and producers, which means that at least half of this equation is business.

My preference for small community based business, run by the ‘little man’, comes from my belief that since they are part of the community they have a stake in its well being, whereas a supermarket chain has concerns only to it’s shareholders who are very much like absentee landlords eternally looking for higher rents as far as senior management is concerned. There is also the sense that a ‘little man’ running his own business has a greater say in how to live his life and the form of the legacy he will leave behind. I’d rather be a citizen than a subject any day of the week. Citizens choose their own destiny to a certain extent, subjects can get neutron jacked out of their jobs. Jack Welch hates that nickname. The joke is that neutron bombs don’t destroy buildings they only kill people, much like Jack himself.

Others will say that there has been increasing interest in ‘corporate responsibility’ and that this will soften the sharp edges of large companies headlong pursuit of monopoly and the market power to squeeze small suppliers until they expire.It’s well known that a great many of Walmarts past suppliers declare bankruptcy while it recorded ever greater profits. It’s abuse of power pure and simple. In politics it would be called a dictatorship, in business it’s called the logic of the market. When did it become ok to elevate something so transparently immoral as this upon the high pedestal it currently rests upon.

However returning to corporate responsibility. That’s rather like saying “military intelligence” and “deafening silence”, it is an oxymoron (why does that sound like zit cream in a non-child proof container?) which gluing two opposing ideas into the one phrase is generally used as vehicle for irony. It is certainly ironic that so many people are using it in a serious, non humorous way. You see corporations are by definition organizations that hide behind their status as limited responsibility entities. So what we have here is an organization which shields itself from responsibility whilst at the same time pursuing it. That’s kind of like a man with claustrophobia trying to stuff himself in a small box. So, if you ask me, any corporation that claims to behave with corporate responsibility is schizophrenic, a danger to society and should be medicated.

Now the only reason they’re getting away with this crap is that you and I are not voting with our dollars as we should. Supermarkets are not cheaper, they just market themselves that way based on an optimal basket of products that no-one ever buys. But the costs are huge - destitute farmers whose slice of the pie gets thinner every year, destitute small vendors whose dwindling earnings remain in the community, providing additional value to customers in the form of government revenues and social services. Most people don’t think about the big picture of how their actions affect their community as a whole. Not only should we be responsible for our actions, we should think about what the consequences are, otherwise we are unconscious citizens at the mercy of the unscrupulous.

So yes, I’m looking out for the little man because he’s me, he’s you, he’s most of us.