Neo-Mercantilism

When consulting with developing countries about restructuring their debt, the IMF generally determines what cash crops would grow best in the area and encourages their cultivation as one way to bring in foreign currency. As advice, this is not terrible. In theory, if a Ghanaian farmer can crop cocoa to sell, he can buy cassava to eat and pocket a profit for himself in Ghanaian cedi that were purchased with the US dollars that bought his cocoa. A boon for him and his government, the constant purchase of Ghanaian currency by US dollars ensures baseline demand for the cedi. With a baseline value set for the cedi, the currency can float within a reasonable margin. This allows Ghana to purchase US dollars at a steady rate so they can acquire strategic resources such as oil at a stable relative price. In this theoretical instance, everyone benefits.

In reality, things are slightly different. While exports of Ghanaian cocoa do create a baseline demand for Ghanaian currency, that is about where the benefits cease. Cassava, once the staple starch of a large portion of sub Saharan Africa, is much less available as cultivation of cocoa has replaced it. You see, as one country goes, so have gone her neighbours. If one country has had its debt restructured by the IMF and the rest have not, then trade of cash crop income for staple crops might allow for one country to arbitrage its agricultural sector against another country's. In reality, however, everyone is chasing the same strategy, because everyone is having their debt restructured by the IMF. Cassava plantations still exist, but the fact is that you make real cash with cocoa, and buy Thai and American grain to eat.

Ironically, the only states that can pursue the production of low-value staples are first-world countries which typically subsidise this production heavily. So, instead of Ghana producing profits through cocoa sales and buying cassava from Benin, they spend their capital on Thai and Chinese rice and American corn. The Ghanaian diet has changed due to the changes in their markets. Whereas the cash cropping brings in a relative monetary gain, it gets spent in nations that don't need the money, on subsidised produce that is not the traditional food of Ghana. While temporarily liberating the countries in question from want of money, they become yoked to first world nations for want of calories – and fertilizer.

Cash cropping deals in dollars per acre. This way of looking at agriculture is not going to be fruitful if the price of staples increases. An increase in the price of staples means a reduction in profit for all the nations who, like Sri Lanka and its tea, Ghana and its cocoa, and Colombia and its coffee, are depending on arbitraging that difference in value between luxuries and staples to remain fed. When the prices of staples rise, calorie farming is more important than cash cropping. Word to the wise: the price of staples is rising. What’s more, in order to increase yields per acre, developing countries with cash crops have gotten themselves onto the agribusiness treadmill. While I am pretty ambivalent about the health issues surrounding GMOs (I don’t really think they are that terrible for you), I am completely livid about the economic implications of addicting farmers to seed contracts. Agribusiness has a way of eating up the profit of farmers big and small to pay for seeds and chemicals. If we look at this issue fundamentally, it’s a question of good, old-fashioned mercantilism. The proverbial North demands the proverbial South to produce its luxuries, the South obliges, and find itself unable to feed its populations. Never fear, says the North – we will sell you the grain you need to survive, and we’ll give you the pesticides and seeds you need to grow more cash crops. Just give us back that profit you made on the first shipment of coffee, and we’ll be on our way…

Agriculture is one sector that can't turn on a dime. Olives take 20 years to mature. Apples might take five. Shifting from one field crop to another might take one year, but it also entails selling one's entire product one year for enough money to buy the seeds or plantings for the next. If the tea market goes flat, and it makes sense to pull up the tea bushes (Gods forbid) and plant something starchy, there's the loss on the fire sale, the labour to pull up the old production, but then the investment in the precursor implements and seeds for a whole new type of farming. That's an enormous opportunity cost. When money is scarce, this change is difficult at the best of times. Like any one of us changing to a completely new line of work, we have to start at the bottom, and that is a choice any one of us would put off as long as humanly possible. This is why, if we hit a price barrier for any given agricultural commodity, it is possible a large plurality of farmers would simply give it up en-masse because they had held out to the last minute and had no other way out. Like cacao farmers infested with frosty pod, they will keep producing until they can produce no more.

The solution? Under the current economic regime there is no real solution. Scientists in the North will develop more interesting varieties of cacao and sell them to the people in the South, diminishing the South’s profit while still shackling them to the task of producing our luxuries. The creation of a GMO is certainly a solution to the problem of a chocolate shortage. It is not a solution to the systemic problem of the mercantilist exploitation of the proverbial South. Lack of crop diversity will make them more prone to food shortages, and reliant on agricultural subsidies in other countries to maintain the low cost of their own labour. This is both a fragile and abusive relationship that simply increases long-term instability in the system.

In the end, the economic system is made up of every single relationship it facilitates. A failure in one part is never isolated, and those who perceive themselves to be immune from shocks are delusional. If we increase the fragility of the links in our economy, we are ensuring future failures. If understanding of the economy from a systemic perspective were the norm, we would curb our own profit motive not simply out of altruism, but for our own self-preservation.

Predicting Future Economic Behaviour: The Price of Food Will Rise

Pretty lame, isn’t it? I mean, pretty much everyone knows that the price of food is already rising. It’s really quite a do-nothing hypothesis when you think about it. “The price of food will rise”. Is that it? Stating the obvious? Does that kind of statement make a guy some kind of economic wizard? No. But I must say this, on the anniversary of Copernicus’ birthday: stating the obvious worked for him.

The reason why the simple statement “the price of food will rise” is so important is not the statement itself. Saying “the earth rotates around the sun” is not, in itself, earthshaking. It’s what follows thereafter. All of a sudden the orbits of the inner and outer planets make sense. When you see the obvious, sometimes other facts that are difficult to reconcile become reconcilable.

The Price of Staples Will Rise

We all know that the price of food is rising, but we’re also hearing about droughts causing crop losses in the US and now Russia is feelingthe pinch, too. With the world’s biggest corn producer and the world’s biggest wheat producer putting out fewer crops, economists have already been able to project that beef, for example, will likely be more expensive toward the middle of this year due to the raising price of feed grain. With more droughts happening lately, the pressure on staples will be constant, and while we can’t necessarily say that the base price of staples will go up, it will fluctuate higher and, on average, be more expensive. When this happens, the meat downstream becomes more expensive by extension. Keep it in the back of your mind now that Russia has shut its doors to grain exports – likely until June – and many previously self-sufficient countries (I’m looking at you, China) are no longer self-sufficient. India is another case where, while they appear to have food under control, the per-person consumption of food calories is lower than in many other food-importing countries and I fear that lowering these calories-per-person is simply not something the Indian market can absorb. Americans can stand to eat fewer calories. Indians may not be able to. Will feed lots be profitable anymore if grain becomes too pricey? Perhaps there will be a rise in grass-fed cattle, which will increase demand for range land. Either way, the meat gets more costly and land gets more scarce. Mid-term result of grain no longer flowing from Russia? The Maghreb, one of the main importers of Russian grain, may have even more unrest to deal with. Watch Egypt.

Inflation Will Rise

The majority of the world spends the majority of its pay on food. North Americans and Europeans are something of an anomaly that way. I’ve already mentioned that inflation in China is on the rise, and when I left China, inflation was high – until they changed the proportions of goods in the grocery basket used to calculate inflation. In effect, inflation in China is a shell game: they don’t want the official number to be too high, so they change the make-up of the products it’s based on. The items they reduced in the basket: food. Sadly for the central government, the people know what’s going on, because they are spending most of their pay on just that. Salaries are going up to cover food price increases. Workers would not go back to the factories after the economic crisis for the same pay they worked for prior. Workers are desperate for enough cash to pay for food – and I’ve already argued that food determines the base price of the workforce. If the cost of food goes up, the cost of work goes up, and food-importing countries will be impacted more. This is one place where the First World worker has the advantage: we can absorb a price rise in food. Others cannot. In the long run, scarce food may start to make us more competitive than we currently are.

Trade Imbalances Will Shift and Potentially Reverse (eventually)

The Chinese have a long memory, and the Opium War is almost a current event on the time scale of that ancient civilization. To oversimplify the reasons China and England became embroiled in this one-sided conflict, we can say that there was a massive trade imbalance between the two countries. In effect, China grew tea and England bought it for gold. The natural problem being that tea can keep growing forever and gold is finite. In order to reverse the flow of bullion, England started assisting opium dealers in trading a different plant product for precious metals. This made the Chinese angry, and they started burning things. That gave the British the opportunity to go in and blow things up, and make the Chinese take the opium – illegal or no. To sum up, trade imbalances make people touchy. Currently, the Chinese hold a trade imbalance against the US which – to a degree – works in both nations’ favour. The Chinese are building an enormous pile of US dollars (not having learned anything from the Opium War, I suppose), and the US gets cheap goods and an endless supply of loans. Once food becomes more expensive, however, the flow of those dollars will slow. This will not require gunboat diplomacy, drug running, or any other kind of shenanigans. It will occur naturally as a consequence of more expensive staples. While there will be volatility in the staples market as the US and Russia have alternating bumper/poor crops (this hurts only the farmers, though – everyone else is more or less unscathed, but farmers start killing themselves when prices do this), eventually the average price of staples will rise. China will be unable to increase its own internal staple production to meet its needs due to overuse of chemicals, lack of groundwater, and desertification. With the relaxing of restrictions on domicile imposed by the hukou system, farmers will start moving to the city in droves. Who once were productive farmers will become consumers in the food system, and leaving large tracts of land to be turned into real estate deserts. I contend China’s food production will never rise in a meaningful way unless a miracle happens and they all of a sudden have a Green Leap Forward. Not bloody likely, but I remain open to serendipity.

This means there are implications for Chinese productivity. Its growth once predicated on cheap unskilled labour, the cost of hiring in China will rise with the price of food. The same kind of production will become untenable in China. Foreign investment – already seeking alternative places to flow such as Vietnam and the Philippines – will threaten to dry up. What may this mean? It may make China blink on monetary policy. One option would be to allow the Yuan to float, the other option would be to unilaterally have the Yuan to rise in value against the dollar. Trade imbalance is going to force changes in monetary policy one way or the other, but this one thing I will say: do not underestimate the power of the US dollar. While its value is more or less based on the fact that it is the global fiat currency for petrol purchase (and the reserve currency for many other international transactions), even in an era of decreasing oil demand due to high price, the USD will retain value because we’ll be buying grain with it – or at least the Chinese will be.

Will there be a grain war? A more exciting reporter than I might say “maybe”. I say “no”. Will there be very boring high-level discussions about monetary policy amongst the grand high mucky-mucks of the Chinese Communist Party and Indian Cabinet? Yes. They may even get into heated arguments. I know. Perish the thought. We live in such turbulent times.

And then There’s the Death and Famine

Oh yes, I forgot. The over billion people that live on between one and two dollars a day will go hungry in droves. This will not have an economic impact on you. I guess you can decide for yourself whether this issue matters to you or not.

The Copernican Economic Shift

So once the economic shift begins, several bets are off. One may be the direction in which trade imbalances begin to flow. Another will be the ability of China to retain its growth in manufacturing centres. Will China shift its monetary policy? Will arable land become a highly desirable asset class? I think there are strong chances of these things happening, if only moderately, in the coming years. One thing I think is a certainty is the increase in the cost of arable land due to interest not only from investors but other states scrambling for the single most important strategic resource in any nation’s arsenal: food. As the old yarn goes, “buy land – they ain’t making any more of it”.

Mycelium Running... for real this time.

I appear to have had some luck running mycelium in coir and wood chips lately. See the above three jars filled with bits of happy mycelium? They are from left to right, pure-ish coir to mixed coir and wood chips. So far it seems like the rightmost mixture is the happiest, though it could also have something to do with the fact it appears to have retained a little more moisture than the others. The pure-ish coir jar seems to have good, fuzzy mycelium in it:

Whereas the one in the mason jar seems to have developed some other form of mould to compete with the pleurotus ostreatus. Perhaps a holdover from its days holding other foods and not being as thoroughly cleaned as it should have been:

If I had supervision of any kind at this time, I might be forced to throw it out, but I really want to see just what happens... and if it goes rank, I'm putting it under the microscope, by gum!

The black soldier fly is doing well. They are crawling off a lot nowadays, so I hope we are getting an increase in the local population. I am not yet ready to start collecting them as I have nothing to use them for. If the neighbourhood allowed it, I would have gotten a chicken or something to et the BSFL, but I think they are going to have to go into an aquarium of fish eventually as fish food. They eat bloody fast though and I'm alone in the house now with dwindling amounts of food to give them. I had a bunch of people over last night, so we had some scraps, but I can't well have a party every night just to feed my BSFL. 

Then again, I suppose I could, and it would be pretty awesome to have a maggot-themed party, I'm sure.

Lastly, I've ordered a vericomposting kit to compost the castings of the BSFL into some friable compost. In order to keep moisture in the indoor food collection bin down, I've been putting dustings of coir in the bottom. These are slowly building up in the BSFL bucket as the BSFL can't really eat coir. After a good soak in the bacteria-rich goo that the BSFL leave in the bucket, it should be soft enough to be able to be eventually digested by the worms I hope. Also would like to plug the vermicomposter's designer, from UFO  (Urban Farms Organic). Check out their designs for high-volume modular composters. I will be reporting back to UFO on how they work out here in the tropics on BSFL leavings.

That's me up-to-date, more news as it happens...

The Wise Prime Minister and Mr. M.

The wise Prime Minister had had enough of the one-size-fits-all solutions that the economic advisors of the previous national parties had left behind. She was new, and had to find a new solution. She was also hungry, and didn't feel like ordering from where she was at the PMO building on Sparks. Instead, she put on her grey hoodie, and snuck out past her RCMP detail (who were busy questioning a tourist about his particularly sharp soapstone carving - a subject about which the Mounties were rather sensitive), and jogged down Sparks to Elgin Street. For comfort food on a Friday night in Ottawa after 5PM, Elgin Street was the only real option. It was either Dunn's, the Elgin Street Diner, or International Shawarma.

Being wise, the Prime Minister decided on shawarma as she didn't have to worry about her breath smelling of garlic sauce once she was out of official meetings. One of the Cabinet ministers had mentioned that once, and she only grabbed shawarma on weekends after work from that day on.

Mr. M. was there, as he usually was on late Friday nights, and the wise Prime Minister chatted with him about business. It was clear the store was hopping, and though they served no alcohol, the tiny shop had a certain bar smell about it.

"It looks like business is brisk," said the wise Prime Minister.

"Of course!" said M., "the bars are getting ready for last call, and people are coming here before heading home... or across the bridge to Gatineau."

"But on Sparks, Bank, O'Connor... all of the shawarma places are closed now. Why are you still open?" asked the wise Prime Minister.

"Go into those places at noon, and it will be as packed as this," said M., "but they are all next to high-priced condos and government offices. My store is in the middle of a bunch of bars and just north of some lower-rent apartments. There's a reason why there's a convenience store across the way, too... they must survive on late night slurpee and condom runs." M. laughed to himself.

"So you're saying that only a few blocks north and west of here, there is a totally different type of business environment to here?" asked the wise Prime Minister.

"It's all about location," said M., "if I had the same hours in this store over on Bank, I'd go out of business. I'd need chairs, for the sit-down lunch crowd. No, my restaurant is all about the people who are going to grab a shawarma and eat it on the way home. If it wasn't for these bars and those apartments - and hey, maybe even that convenience store, my model wouldn't survive."

"You mean that other businesses - even businesses in the food and beverage industry - actually increase your sales?"

Mr. M. motioned to the line at his tiny counter that extended out the door, "See for yourself, Ms. Prime Minister."

The wise Prime Minister didn't expect to be so easy to recognise to early in her tenure, and blushed instantly. Mr. M. offered her a mint from a small jar.

"On the house." winked Mr. M., as he reached behind the bar to blast his theme song onto the street - a siren call to the drunk, the lost, and the otherwise sleepless denizens of the East downtown core.

The End of Wishing

Durban has ended in yet another do-nothing-disguised-as-a-half-measure. Kyoto was never going to succeed. We have been duped long enough. We have to stop wishing others will see the light and solve the problem for us. Anjali Appadurai had it right when she said:

I speak for more than half the world’s population, we are the silent majority. You’ve given us a seat in this hall, but our interests are not at the table. What does it take to get a stake in this game? Lobbyists? Corporate influence? Money? ... You have been negotiating all of my life. In that time, you’ve failed to meet pledges, you’ve missed targets, and you’ve broken promises.

She's right. Hell, I'm more than twice her age and they've been negotiating MY whole life. As a youth, I wrote a letter to then Prime Minister Brian Mulroney about Acid Rain - he's the only Prime Minister who actually wrote me back and signed his name on the paper, by the way. Now, after Canada took so many strides to stop the tide of noxious chemical fumes across the border (admittedly, the noxious fumes mainly stopped due to American government regulations that stated industries had to openly declare their effluents, combined with the fact the bottom fell our of American manufacturing), and was viewed as a leader in Environmentalism by so many, we've stepped out of Kyoto. Durban has been the final confirmation of a sad fact: national governments are both unequipped to and incapable of effecting adequate change to save our children's future.

At first, the thought is immensely depressing. We wonder why we let ourselves get strung along for decades with nothing but unfulfilled targets as our recompense. We wonder how - after cultivating such a careful cynicism - we could have been duped. Depression turns to horror as we think of the world our children will inherit. Horror at the thought that our kids will have it even rougher than us. Our generation is the first generation in recent history that will have less than the generation before it. Where we are newcomers to (or soon-to-be newcomers to) an economy where the search for jobs is cruel and unrelenting for so many... will our children enter a world when their search is for fresh water? Arable land? We have wants, but what wants will they have?

If you take a moment, though, it is possible to transcend this horror. We can break through the veil of inevitability if we simply change the way we look at the situation. If governments keep getting made by promises that aren't kept; if we sense that there is a rule here that seems to govern governments such that they inevitably end up taking the most wildly shortsighted path toward the future; if we are seeing the same thing happening over and over and over again, we might just be stuck in a self-perpetuating and self-reinforcing system. Knowing that is the first step to liberation. It doesn't sound like it, but bear with me.

There is an ancient Norwegian poem that has a stanza which states, "Ice we call the broad bridge (Ís kǫllum brú bræiða)". If you think of it, a seafaring people which used rivers for trade shouldn't think of ice that way. Rivers were the conduit to their sources of wealth inland, ice was a stopper of commerce and... well, let's be honest... raping an pillaging. There can't be anything good about a drakkar frozen into the ice if you're a Viking. If you think about it, though, the stanza makes sense. Ice allows you to cross to the other side on foot. Previously impossible communication and trade is now possible. It just so happens that you have to use a different mode of transport, and the direction you're travelling is perpendicular to the direction you would normally travel. It takes a change of outlook, but the change doesn't mean the end - it just means you've got different opportunities.

As long as you can wrap your head around the change in lifestyle, you're gold.

The first step is realising there's a problem. The drakkar's frozen in the ice, and you're not going downriver anytime soon. Governments are trapped in a positive feedback loop that makes them do things that are not in their own long-term self-interest. In this case, it makes no sense to down the oars and grab the rudder. You're not going anywhere that way. You have to acknowledge the predicament you're in, and have a good think.

A good first stop to learning how to change a system is Donella Meadows' masterpiece article "Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System". Donella Meadows is an unsung genius of systems theory, and sadly, she was lost to us before her time. What remains of her written work is well worth a read as she had a knack for making the unfathomable into something not only understandable but palatable as well. An easy reference to the twelve leverage points is on Wikipedia and her book, Thinking in systems : a primer, is available on Amazon. Her advice is great, but perhaps not exactly what we need right at the beginning. What we need at the beginning is a less sweeping philosophy. We need something a little more local.

If the national government is unable to change, then focus smaller. Change can happen at the Provincial level, the Municipal level, even the community level... but it can also happen on the individual level. As long as we have some objectives in mind when we do our local thing, we are acting in the interest of the "think global, act local" mantra. One global change we can enact locally is to rely less on hard currency, and save it for what we can't avoid using it on. If you do one or two things that either help you not spend money, or help you trade goods rather than services with other people, then you can hold on to cash for things like the heating bill - which can't be paid in carrots. Here are a few general ideas to start us down that road.

Money is a golden treadmill. The more comes in, the faster you run, the harder it is to get off. Debt is the same, only backwards. Either way, you're running... and the more you run, the more the wheel has you. The key is not to have more money or simply reduce your debts. The key is to reduce the need for money in you life. That can happen in a number of ways, and the most important one, in my opinion, is sharing. Our economies began in gift-giving and social debt rather than barter and financial debt. The concept of debt was originally moral rather than accountable. Many societies continue this gift-giving tradition. The Japanese, for one, give gifts all the time - though if you ask them, they'd like the whole tradition to stop. To my friends and family in Japan, gift-giving is a bit like a treadmill, too - once one gift is given, you MUST reciprocate. It can go on forever, and this problem is compounded by the fact that the gifts are typically useless and purchased with money. What's more, when I take a gift to my friends or family in Japan, it's typically food and they typically feel obliged to open it right there and share it with you, which is kind of defeating the purpose of giving them something. I love the Japanese very much, but their culture, much like every other culture in the world (mine included) has its weird parts. My father-in-law has a solution. He grows organic vegetables. His vegetables are DELICIOUS. He tells me with great relish how he brews up garlic and hot pepper sprays as insect deterrence, cuts bottles into little whirlygigs to put on poles so the ground vibrations scare moles, and he also likes to discuss the finer points of keeping a matsutake mushroom plot secret. To this day he's still opaque about whether or not he ACTUALLY has a matsutake mushroom plot. Well played, dad-in-law, well-played.

His goal, however, is the farming itself... so he doesn't keep most of his harvest. His vegetables go straight to his clients, who are quite delighted to have them. Here's the solution: give something home made and useful, like vegetables. Make wine or beer. Have an apple tree in the front yard and share the fruit. Do something cheap (or preferably free), make a surplus, and give it away. If it is something that replaces money that someone else might have spent, you've done your job. You have successfully stopped money - even if it's pennies - from entering the market. Gift-giving can turn into more long-term and regular arrangements. For instance, I currently teach English to a person who, in turn, comes to my house and teaches my son Japanese (and gets a good lunch out of the bargain, as well). Give what you have to show what you've got, and perhaps someone else will make the deal more permanent.

Have you spoken to your neighbours lately? Do they have a car? Do you work in the same place? You could commute together. Cars are the bane of my existence. They are endless money pits that do nothing but depreciate in value, pollute the air, and break down unexpectedly. When I was living in Canada, I walked to work 45 minutes every day (yes, even on THOSE days). I still had a car for groceries and the like, but I walked to work. It's something you might want to consider: if you have a car, you may be wasting money. Here is a nifty calculator to determine how much that might be. Here's a quick tip - buying a new car is about equal to adding over $100k to your mortgage. Ask yourself, would you like $100,000 more house, or would you like a car? If you feel you need a car for your job, is it a job you really want to be doing? Could you do a job within walking distance for $500 less per month instead of paying for insurance and gas and lease and repairs? Currently, I live in a huge metropolis with horrible traffic, and I ride a little electric scooter. It's slow, it's small, and it's cheap... but it also fits between the cars, and I get home faster than anyone driving in a four-wheeled vehicle. You could get a similar model - or an e-bike - for a reasonable amount. As a matter of fact, it's about the same as a standard adult-sized bike. To me, I'd rather pay higher rent and walk/bike than pay rent and be a slave to a car lease. In the end, not owning a car is a good financial decision, and by doing so, the money treadmill turns slower.

Going back to a gift-giving and barter economy (at least in small part) should assist us save a little money for lifestyle improvements down the road... like that solar panel you always wanted, or just a better mash tun for your all-grain brewing operation. Those are a few ideas that you can use to wean yourself and your friends and neighbours off hard currency a little. Trust me, these skills and flows of goods will come in useful! If the power goes out for a couple days, you'll be glad to know that Maggie down the road has fresh veggies, that Jim on the corner has the compost Maggie likes, and you've got the homebrew that Jim likes. These little safety nets make life a little more comfortable.

The next stop on this ride is municipal policy, and you can start to read about that here and here and here and here...

What's the Big Idea??

A big problem of mine is assuming that people can read my mind. I realise, yet again, that a lot of the things I have been thinking about for a sustainable living project have simply never left my tiny little brain. To the end of airing these ideas, I thought I’d write down what I have been thinking about for the past few weeks. It centres on a kind of thought experiment: a row-house complex with four units on a plot of land. Four families, all living and perhaps working in the complex, and attempting to make a go of living functionally (if not actually) off grid. The reason for building a rowhouse complex is pretty clear: when building to a passive house standard, the money is all in the envelope of the house. That means that building a row unit saves on insulation of at least one quarter (and at most more than one half) of the total outer wall area, allowing for more square footage at a lower per square foot cost. Heating (which would likely amount to no more than $400/yr for the whole complex based on the passive house standard) would then be shared through the condo association.

First off, I imagine a lot between 25-100 acres, 50-75% treed, mainly with hardwoods would be preferable. In my most specific preferences, those hardwoods would be ash and birch, but I realise I can’t necessarily be choosy in this regard. The project I am imagining is a mixed-revenue and rather holistic economic enterprise that does not focus on any one product, instead it’s meant to produce a number of “crops” while taking into account the general laziness of the occupants, so the forested portion of the project is geared toward a kind of slow silviculture. Birch and ash, you see, have a couple advantages. Both are good saleable woods, but they can also both be coppiced, which is perhaps one of the most sustainable modes of forestry around. Coppicing produces the same kind of succession that the typical forest cycle naturally produces through the occasional fire or catastrophe, allowing for the meadow-dwelling ecosystem to remain more or less undisturbed on the land for as long as it is coppiced in a proper cycle. Ash and birch work well on a 12-15 year cycle, so the forested region would be divided into 15 and coppiced regularly in sequence. Ashwood makes good poles, axe (and other tool) handles, longbows, you name it. Both ash and birch can be tapped.  It would allow me to regularly make the joke to people that “I’d tap that ash”. Just that is worth the lulz.

Clearing would be required for a house, and I have it in mind to get subdivisible land. One of the things about having a real estate family is that they are quick to point out the market facts that theory doesn’t take into account. One of those things is that owning a house that is part of a housing cooperative instantly makes it both difficult to resell and therefore drops its market value. I understand that, in theory, housing cooperatives SHOULDN’T have this saleability problem, and in theory, they are just another form of house ownership that can be transferred like any other… but in practice, it don’t work that way. Cooperative housing enthusiasts would be quick to give me an earful of counterarguments, but my reality is the market. I would like a multi-family project, but I want it to be a project that is based on ownership of a whole house and not of a share in a cooperative. Luckily, condominium ownership is more mainstream and provides the capacity to 1) own a unit in the rowhouse complex, and 2) have a cooperative vehicle by which the collective can share access to common areas. This division between personal and public is key. A member of the project owns a house and through the condo association owns access to the common land and greenhouse attached to the complex.

My idea calls for a greenhouse to be located on a south-exposed slope and attached directly to the house. This is because it would allow for some of the greywater filtration and urine processing concepts that I’ve already talked about before. Each greywater system would be separate for each house, so there can be no recriminations about who threw the candy wrappers in the loo. While I still believe it is possible to edify adults to the point that they can transcend the tragedy of the commons, it is hard to do this for unsupervised children. Realism should prevail when it comes to this kind of systems design. The greenhouse would contain aquaponics systems that should also run separately, if only for the purposes of sustainability: one linked system that fails leaves everyone hungry; one of four individual systems is just a temporary stress on production. Vegetables can be produced year round in such a system, and fish can be harvested on a routine basis after a year. I am planning on experimenting with a “bioponics” system here in the Philippines that requires no fish food inputs to be purchased. If it works, that would be a substantial savings on traditional aquaponics methods and would integrate food waste processing into the whole house system. Any organics that cannot be processed easily in the black soldier fly and vermiculture bins can be pyrolised for biochar in a biochar gasifier. There are commercial units available that are virtually fuel-neutral, since running the system from a hopper requires only propane to start the gasfication process, and continuous processing would not only not require further fuel but it would heat the greenhouse too. This is another reason to keep woods other than hardwoods on the lot: fuel for the biochar gasifier that produces heat for the greenhouse and biochar for the garden.

Some people have become convinced that what I am interested in is “farming”. No. It isn’t. Farming is not something I really want to do. That said, a limited amount of farming would be good to offset food costs and perhaps create some value-added assets for the project. Farming is simply a small part of a greater project I am interested in.  I am actually more interested in small-scale manufacture or value-added production. To me, the perfect industry would be a brewery or cider operation, since it produces so much organic by-product.  Mixing this with an oyster and shiitake mushroom operation would be advantageous, and both are reasonable profit for work input. Such an operation already exists elsewhere and is tried and tested. Raising grain would be great if quantities could be adequate for very small scale brewing. Still, there should be a minimal dependence on any one product, and the production should move to where the resource is most abundant in any given year.

I’m painting a lot of blue sky. This is because the end result is more important than how the project gets there. The end result that this project aims for is not some kind of anachronistic pastoral dream or a retreat from society. The aim is sustainability – for sustainability’s sake. The aim is to have a place where basic needs are fulfilled - food, water, clothing, and shelter – and the occupants can take several different tacks to create value for their products and make money enough to cover the stuff they can’t make themselves. I’m not attempting to re-create an old way of life but – even if it never gets past the thought experiment phase – moving toward creating a lifestyle that’s more focussed on satisfying human needs without requiring recourse to working in an office. Consider this: if you own a car, you’re paying about $150 per month in gas, $200 per month in car payments and $50 in insurance. That’s $400 of your after-tax salary, which is about $500 real dollars. What if you took a $400 pay cut and walked to work? You’d be saving money, you wouldn’t have the sudden outlays that are occasionally necessary for cars (and the thousand natural shocks that tyres are heir to). What if we then thought that way about food?

What if we decided that, instead of enslaving ourselves so another person can become wealthy from our toil, we just unhitched ourselves from that treadmill and went happily away to a place where we provided for ourselves? That’s the idea. Not farming, not some form of country lordship… just taking care of your needs without getting beguiled by the dollar signs.

London Riots

Occasionally, the ideas of many become synchronistic enough to manifest a Zeitgeist. A meme catches on like a wildfire; unanimity builds out of formlessness. This often happens within, but not across, demographic boundaries. Each demographic may take similar actions, but for entirely different reasons. From these manifold motivations uniform actions can come, but more often than not, manifold motivations manifest manifold machinations. In order for a meme to jump demographic boundaries, it must affect either the importance of a motivation (e.g. hunger normally trumps jewellery) or the utility of an action (e.g. employment can fulfill several human needs, whereas food can only fulfill a few – and only one or two of those things isn’t naughty). Our human capacity to “muddle on through” seems to be based on these fundamentals. We know, without need for deep thought, that food is more important than most things in life, but when it is plentiful, we turn our eyes to the next most pressing motivation. A hierarchy of needs (though it is likely not Maslow’s) is there, but we conveniently forget necessities when they are fulfilled in order to concentrate on the next need that needs fulfilling. That is the truth of it: human activities are so seldom exactly uniform because we are all acting on a different set of immediate circumstances. We have different contexts and different immediate needs. Fulfilling long-term needs, especially when the immediate opportunity cost is high, is not in our programming. Unanimity is, therefore, tough to manifest.

Unanimity is further obscured due to the fact we are products of learned behaviour. To a perpetual student, the solution to the lack of jobs is more training. To a junkie, the solution to coming down is another hit. To a gambler, the solution to going bust is just one more roll of the dice. Stepping out of our programmed patterns of behaviour is difficult, and uniform action requires many people step out of their comfort zone. That’s hard for humans to do even in a nurturing and accepting environment. I’ve met very few people who take to new experiences well. For many, it takes at least a moment of reflection, but more often it takes deep thought, rationalisation, and time to let the new reality seep in. Few people adapt immediately to the loss of a job. Few people can adapt readily to the loss of a loved one. It takes time to get used to the idea that you’ve graduated from grade school. Change is tough, and takes some coping to get right.

Then came the Arab Spring. We in the West persist in calling it a rising up of people to fight for freedom… but freedom is such an ephemeral and hard-to-quantify need. As a matter of fact, it isn’t really a need at all. Except in Libya, which seems to be an odd anomaly, the popular uprisings have been peaceful. The repression has not. Still, in Syria, peaceful protests persist even in the face of slaughter. Do these protests seek the overthrow of governments? Do they seek democracy and accountability? Perhaps. The immediate need that is being fulfilled for most people in these protests isn’t democracy though. Democracy isn’t a need. Accountability isn’t a need. Hope, however, is.

While hope itself may seem ephemeral and hard to quantify, I assure you, hope is a Boolean variable. You either have it, or you don’t. Here’s how to tell whether you do: if you think that there is a possibility your life could be better tomorrow than it is today, then you have hope. The martyr who lit himself on fire and ignited the whole Maghreb had lost all hope. Upon reflection, it appears that hopelessness resonated throughout the region. Where the middle class is rapidly being put into its place as a new underclass beneath the hyper-rich and the despotic, the hope that hard work will result in a more comfortable and happier future is wearing off. Mobility was promised to those who could do their time in post-secondary education and stick it out in entry-level for a few years, but that security had become more and more tenuous. In all of the Arab Spring regimes, protest was not permitted. Protest of any kind was considered seditious. Peaceful protest in and of itself was and is therefore notable. That protest is now sending a message to leaders in the Maghreb and in the Middle East: give us a better future or get out of our way. The dimmer the light at the end of the tunnel appears, the more realistic it seems to dig a new tunnel.

Similar dynamics are at work closer to home. The Obama election campaign tapped into America’s lack of hope with an unrelenting zeal. His progress, once elected, was steadily watched. The electorate waited with bated breath for when he was going to work his miracle… but his presidency has been marked by simple, though reasonably sensible, governance. He can’t crack the lobbies, nor can he undo partisanship, nor can he wrench himself easily out of military commitments made during the preceding presidency. The weight of history is heavy on his shoulders, and his ability to create more hope in America than there was before his election has likely fallen short of expectations. Whether this will affect his re-election is a moot point; his election itself proved that there is the beginning of a unanimity of purpose that is spreading throughout America. It is proof positive that the idea of hope, necessitating change, is a meme that has jumped demographic boundaries. Hopelessness moved the swing vote. If the vote doesn’t provide results for hopelessness… then what will hopelessness do next? Is it lost on people in Europe and North America that the middle class is becoming a new underclass for the hyper-rich? The same hopelessness of being crushed under the boot-heel of a despotic regime is dawning on the middle classes of the developed world, but it is no despot who is doing the crushing. The hopelessness comes from the hedge funds that annihilated their retirement savings. The investment houses that set their retirement savings up to be annihilated. The government that allows the same criminals who perpetrated this travesty to get away, scott-free, with their bonuses intact. There is a new sense of hopelessness rising in the developed world, and more and more, western governments are using familiar methods of curbing it.

We can see an indication in the London riots as to what may happen. I had predicted the Arab Spring would come to Europe and the US, but I admit I had not predicted it would turn violent, nor did I think England would be the first to taste it. Writer after writer have fallen over themselves attempting to distance these looters and rioters from the nobility of the Arab Spring, but such distinction is rhetorical, self-congratulatory, and wrong. The rioting in London is equally produced by a confluence of hopelessness. The methods used are equally an affront to the establishment. Whereas in Egypt, massive protests were seditious even if peaceful, in a democracy, peaceful protest is just par for the course. It was when the powers that be stopped listening to protesters that protest itself gave no feeling of hope. The rioters in London have spoken in a language that is heard by Whitehall as loud as the voices of the Arab Spring have been heard in palaces around the Middle East. These were not race riots, they do not conform to readily identifiable trait except this: they are a different kind of uprising. Cracking down on them will only reinforce the sense of hopelessness they manifest. Pouring water on a flame will normally douse it.

That is, of course, if it wasn't started with oil.

Wages and Subsidies: the Sri Lankan Case

I was talking before about a simple model of an economy with food as the basic component. I had said "... food fuels labour, labour fuels industry, industry fuels growth, and growth fuels the economy". It's totally simplistic, but when it comes to economic models, simplicity can be a blessing. Since any population increases over time, that population needs to bring more land under cultivation and requires more inputs to increase production. The prices of those inputs (under the current industrial farming paradigm) sadly track oil prices, so the cost of cultivating more land more intensively fluctuates. The tendency, as with all non-renewable and scarce resources that are being extracted more and more intensively, is always that price increases over time.

Food cost is a major consideration for a huge proportion of the global population. Excepting we in the super-rich West, people tend to spend the largest part of their salary dollar on food. A tiny increase can be telling. I remember during the War in Sri Lanka when the cost of coconuts rose drastically. I remember saying at that time that it didn't matter how many southern Sri Lankan sons died in the conflict up north, the next election would be decided on the price of a coconut. Coconuts, being a staple food in Sri Lanka, were a daily necessity. The careful shredding and use of coconut meat in such delicious (and ubiquitous) foods as pol sambol:

...necessitated a constant supply. When the price went up, news programs were filled with stories of ladies going to the market to purchase half a coconut where before they had easily bought a whole one. First of all, my mouth is watering just looking at that picture of pol sambol (that is some GOOD food). Second of all, hunger is a primordial signal to the human body that something's wrong. If you're hungry, you're motivated. You can even say that euphemistically: if someone is "hungry" it means they have an objective in sight and will do anything in their power to get it. Hunger is one of the things that can create unrest, so it's to be avoided if at all possible.

How did this play out in Sri Lanka? Let's remember that this is a country terminally short on capital. The basic and fundamental source of the value of the Rupee was (and likely still is) foreign currency reserves sent home from the Gulf States where Sri Lankan women work as housemaids and men work predominately as cooks. Without this influx of capital, the Rupee would be utterly meaningless. As a matter of fact, I was completely unable to exchange Rupees for dollars anywhere outside Sri Lanka. The Sri Lankan government was always short on liquidity and paying for war materiel is expensive, so, on 21 July, 2007, Ag Minister Nanayakkara announced a program to expand food production through land grants. No money was available, but the government could give up land for production so long as the companies gave back profits and financed the industries themselves. Food (and fuel) imports, it was understood, bled the economy dry of foreign currency reserves:

Sri Lanka spent US $ 2 billion only for food product imports during 2006. The country spent the same amount of money on petroleum imports, a commodity that cannot be produced locally.

The problem with Sri Lanka, as with so many other developing nations, is that it is a victim, to a degree, of its mercantilist past as well as the IMF's idiotic focus on cash crops for the purposes of economic development. On little island, stuff has to be imported. Better it be luxuries than staples. Luxuries you can live without. Staples, not so much. Sri Lanka got it backwards, exporting tea and workers for food, and keeping wages low locally to keep more seats at the local cotton-gins.

The land-for-profit-sharing under Minister Nanayakkara clearly wasn't getting the desired results in the pipeline because in November of 2007, King Dutugemunu himself announced further subsidies for rice farming and an elimination of VAT on rice purchases. Another problem was the breakup of prime coconut land (which is predominantly also scenic coastal sandy territory) which was also solved by fiat:

The government was also planning to ban the break up of coconut land and putting them to alternative uses. There is a strong political lobby to prevent coconut land being in fast developing areas for purposes which generate a higher economic value.

Still, in early 2008:

Coconut production rose by 3.0 per cent during the year benefiting from favourable weather conditions but the prices of coconut and coconut based products increased sharply reflecting the world trend of increasing demand for organic oils to produce bio-fuel as a supplement to expensive fossil fuel.

The concept of coconut price going up in response to biofuel production is a canard. The Rajapakse regime maintained a very tight control on the media, and dissenting presses found their machinery sabotaged if they dared violate lèse majesté. Some journalists have even been kidnapped or shot and hacked to death for these violations - so when reading SL media be certain to take the pro-government bias with a pound of salt. The cause and effect are plain: coconut prices rising, reliance on foreign currency for war materiel as well as oil and food, government attempts to stem the conversion of coconut plantation to luxury hotels by fiat, further increases in price of coconut. Would there be a wage increase commensurate to the cost of food?

2009.08.26 No, there won't.

2010.01.24 Election promise: there will be private sector wage increases!

2010.02.11 Maybe they'll fulfil election promises?

2011.01.11 No, the promises won't be fulfilled. We've also run out of money for subsidies!

That the government is forced to stave off hunger by subsidising the increase of agricultural input and subsidising the cost of food seems like a really unsustainable idea. As a matter of fact, that's how it played out in SL. Sure, you can offset the costs for a little while, but in the end, you'll run out of money. The sad part about all of this is that the reason for keeping food costs artificially low is to maintain wage competitiveness. Wage competitiveness is all about luring industry, and industry comes not to better the country it sets up in, but to exploit lower operation costs. Labour is a major consideration. China has been a great beneficiary of this as well. I know another government that is running out of liquid capital due to war expenditures, but at least it produces its own food. How much of that food is bought locally? How much of the cheap food is imported? What if there was to be a sudden down-valuation of the US dollar that increased the cost of that low-cost food? The knock-on effects of relying on food imports and low wages are rather profound.

So, when we are talking about industrial inputs, we are talking about raw materials, labour, and energy costs. Labour is a huge cost in the developed world, and a portion of the cost of labour is the cost of labour's input: food. If food prices go up (which they basically must... food production is finite), then labour costs should go up. The only way to stop this from happening is to intervene artificially in how the market sets prices. When labour says they haven't got enough food to live, and industry says they haven't got enough money to pay salaries, should it be government's place to perpetuate the low cost of labour by subsidising food production? Should it be government's place to allow the weak corporations to survive? Should we let the exploitation of labour and government continue at the hands of industry?

We need to stop subsidies. In the end, many subsidies simply perpetuate bad business practices by enabling industry to keep the cost of labour low. That sends the wrong price signals, and bases our economy on a dream rather than reality. As we all know, dreams come to an end.

Water and Food are Strategic Resources

When people talk about strategic resources, they typically mean a few bits of materiel reserved for use in the event of the outbreak of war: uranium, titanium, and oil lead the pack. Oil is the sine qua non of modern strategic resources. Without it, no military can operate. It has been so since the Second World War. But before the WWII there was a saying: "an army marches on its stomach". Did we forget that adage, or was it simply taken for granted that so long as we could fuel the lines of supply there would be enough food? The latter sounds right to me. Food is taken for granted, whereas before, it was central to military affairs. How now? Is food important as a strategic resource? Does its scarcity have the ability to destabilise populations? Are national policies put in place to control the distribution of and access to food? Yes, yes, and yes.

Recent events in the Middle East have pointed to a deep and abiding need for democratic reform. They are signs that grassroots populist movements can rise and demand regime change. But what methods are used to keep down these uprisings? Well, there seems to be a clear pattern:

2008 MAR: Yemen - "In March 2008, in the middle of a world food price crisis, the cost of wheat more than doubled in the space of four months, leading to weeks of protests and riots across the country. In the past two weeks, the price of wheat in Yemen has risen by 45 percent, and the cost of rice by 22 percent, according to the World Food Programme. The value of the Yemeni rial is also in decline, while the U.S. dollar is increasingly difficult to come by in the capital."

2008 JUN 16: World Bank gives Yemen $100M to lower food prices (the Houthi Rebellion has gone on since 2004, but aid came only after food riots in March)

2011 JAN 14: Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali pledges to reduce prices on staples of bread, sugar, and milk

2011 JAN 16: Kuwaiti Emir Sheikh Sabah al-Ahmad al-Sabah orders food distributed for free for 14 months. As of yet, no Kuwaiti uprising has materialised.

2011 JAN 20: Jordanian Prime Minister Samir Zaid al-Rifai announces increased subsidies on heating oil and food.

2011 JAN 30: Hosni Mubarak orders maintenance of food subsidies.

2011 FEB 04: King Hamad bin Isa Al Khalifa of Bahrain orders increased subsidies on food

And so on.

Even after political change has been won, there is a further problem to be faced: political freedom does not emancipate the poor from poverty. In Egypt now, the decision to end subsidies may triple the cost of staple bread. Subsidies are touted by governments as a way to redistribute the wealth and give the poor more buying power when it comes to the daily necessities. I can understand. I have said it before, the basis of any decision to work for a low wage is predicated on whether I can feed my babies or not. The inability to do so would instil me with vitriolic rage or abject hopelessness. The haunt of hunger is the home of hyperbole. Given the opportunity to live on a meagre wage, so long as my kids were fed, I might choose to eat bitterness and shovel my 16 tons. Subsidies might keep the peace, and ensure adequate food gets distributed to the poor. Still, something is missing from this picture.

Subsidies are funny creatures. We think that they are geared at helping people live from day to day, helping people feed their families. But who actually benefits from them? Now that we've seen the natural progression of thinking for a regular ordinary bloke trying to feed his kids - from despondency to the capacity to bear poverty - what can we truly say subsidies have done? They've driven down the cost of labour, that's what. Subsidies are passed directly to corporations by increasing the public's capacity to bear poverty. The alternative, as we've seen, is rioting. But is it the fault of the government for being unable to provide adequate subsidies, or is it a problem of labour being underpriced?

Subsidies may be defined as helping the poor buy food, but let's call them what they really are: a stopgap measure to address the structural failure of an economy to distribute wealth fairly. Price controls on foodstuffs (and other consumables) are the same thing. Why should the nation tread the razor's edge between deficit spending and riots? In a constant balancing act between two extremes, the key is not to play one side off against the other, but to move the razor. I would much rather balance between a wall-mounted LCD display and not having a wall-mounted LCD display rather than balance poverty against hunger.

And yet, here we are. Subsidies were necessitated by wages that never increased while the price of everything else did. Therein lies the secret to the source of a great deal of hyper-wealth: the disparity between growth in wages and growth in prices. If wages had increased with the price of food - an essential input to labour - then I wit there would be far fewer hyper-wealthy individuals out there, and governments would have less of a deficit. As it stands, we've eaten ourselves into a hole... and done so by spening the money we should have had lying around to dig ourselves out.

So, food fuels labour, labour fuels industry, industry fuels growth, and growth fuels the economy, right? Well, except that growth of the economy will equal greater consumption of those basic consumables, which makes them more scarce, which should make them higher-priced. But if the join between food and labour is based on a subsidised price, then that price signal will not be correctly interpreted by the market. The cost of food stays low, labour stays low, industry stays low, but growth continues (and makes the wealthy extra wealthy!). Which means the price of stuff should be higher... but there's this fantastical wall of subsidy that makes the price of food imaginary. So consumption increases because of growth, and growth doesn't cause a price increase in food, so production of food has to be artificially stimulated to keep up with growth. If price increase doesn't happen, production increase isn't naturally incentivised! The government has to do it itself. Enter agricultural subsidies.

What's already a drain on the treasury has become an even greater drain, precisely because the treasury was being drained to begin with. In this way, an ongoing cost begets and ongoing cost. The government gets trapped propping up its labour and agricultural sector, and where does the money go? Industrial profits. Agricultural subsidies increase supply of food, food subsidies maintain the low price of food, which maintains the low price of labour, which allows for a bigger profit margin for industry because while the cost of goods is going up, the cost of labour stays the same. Subsidies are a band-aid solution to a structural problem. If you leave a bandage on for too long, your wound can fester, but ripping it off is a temporary pain. Sadly, there isn't a single government in the world that wants to be the one that stops subsidies. In an autocratic system, you've already seen what happens... and when the proverbial faeces hit the proverbial impeller, the leaders there reverted to doing what's always worked before when there were problems with the plebians: they gave them bread. This last time, it didn't work (except in Kuwait). In a democracy, the government that removes subsidies doesn't get re-elected. There we are, stuck in a pickle where food prices can't increase to temper demand, where the government can't pull out of the incessant need to subsidise food, and can't stop artificially stimulating the supply of food. Until now.

Now, we hit a wall. Now we tap out our aquifers. The Middle East is the natural place to begin the adjustment to the reality of market forces because the aquifers won't replenish themselves. With subsidies reaching the extent of their ability to keep up with actual food prices, food production is getting to the point where artificial stimulation (including the massive irrigation projects of the gulf and Maghreb) by money can't push yields any higher, and growth runs into the wall of economic reality: eventually, the market undergoes a correction.

The Arab Spring is a great and noble thing, but we need to learn our lessons from it as well. This is certainly more than a market correction - it was a humanitarian correction - and it continues as I write. But Egypt and Tunisia are the first to emerge free of political oppression only to find economic repression there waiting for them. The first to find out that all those subsidies and economic smoke and mirrors cost ungodly amounts of money. The correction happens now, and higher wages are going to be the order of the day, or history will repeat itself. The wall that economic growth is hitting is not imaginary; it is quite real. Only when the real cost of food is known will it become a matter of importance. As the Middle East has shown, food is a strategic resource. We can't afford not to pay for it.

An Idea for an Organic Farm

So I made an open call to a group of my friends to see who would be interested in buying in to a sustainable farm. This is something of a dream of mine, and one I’ve talked often about, but not been able to be totally serious about until now. If the housing market holds up, I will hopefully be able to put together a grubstake to build a rather good house in the country. The catch is that I think it would be better if other families (specifically those with some young kids like mine) came along too. Quite selfishly, I want the clean living lifestyle with food security for my family without giving up the close socialisation my kids get in a city environment. While it’s still my own dream, the family is what’s important.

It struck me, after talking to one of my friends, that people just saw an idea and a price tag and didn’t really picture what I had in mind when I made my offer. Well, here it is in black and white: a concept for a self-sustaining organic farm… with high-speed internet (that’s important). I’ve been researching the technology and everything that I am going to talk about here is mature tech – not pie in the sky tech that might come out in a few years. This is stuff on the ground, now. As many of you know, a lot of our great energy-saving concepts came out of the gas crunch of the 70’s, so these things – while not going mainstream – have nonetheless seen improvement since then. Such things as methane digesters and composting toilets have come a long way. Frankly, a lot of this tech could be implemented in a low-tech low-cost way, but I rather wanted to use stuff that kept the comfort of modern living with the added bonus of being sustainable. Cost reductions are therefore possible with simplification, but only if necessary.

Also, I have been attempting to build a realistic plan by putting together possible alternative income streams other than crops. Growing Power is an inspiration in this regard, as they conceive of the working urban farm in terms of dollars per square foot and attempt to extend profit-making activities beyond simple food production. The modern organic farm concept is something of a highly diverse business venture, with chances to tap income streams all over the map. Additionally, organic farms have the odd habit of attracting cheap labour (WWOOFers et. al.) because they are a shared passion amongst we greeners. Spinoff enterprises include everything from cob and cordwood building courses (which serve to populate the property with guesthouses and outbuildings) as well as aquaponics and organic farming courses that would be a source of income outside the traditional farming model. With a good sized stand of sugarbush, spring tourism would be a possible revenue stream during the sap run. With existing contacts, a yearly Japanese maple syrup tour would be more than possible, and would represent a source of labour that incurs a negative cost: a revenue stream that creates another revenue stream.

So, I am not too concerned about the opportunities to derive profit from an organic farming operation. The issue then is to talk about what exactly the operation would work. My core theory is that of Jacobsian extension: the longer you keep stuff in your system, the more opportunities you have of making profit from it over and over again. The basis is then an attempt to create an almost closed loop system. A closed loop system is functionally impossible – sunlight is an external input that simply keeps on giving, therefore with that external energy source, there is no such thing as a closed-loop system. The key, then, is to make that sunlight input last as long as possible in your system and be a gift that keeps on giving.

LAND: Optimally, I see 100 acres of land with 30-40 acres clear and 60-70 acres in mainly maple. The clear would hopefully have only a small gradient, but the treed area could have a diverse landscape with bogs and hillocks. That’s my preference, but my ideas can be scaled to reality if need be. I would prefer it in a good growing region (6 or 7) but a high 5 will do fine. Access to local water sources preferred but not totally necessary.

HOUSE: The main expense of the operation, the house would be designed to qualify for a Passivhaus certification, meaning it would effectively pay for itself over the long run. Passivhaus design started decades ago (the inspiration came from a hyper-insulated house in Saskatchewan) and is the most strict energy-saving certification in existence. Most Passivhaus designs do not require central heating, even in the depths of a Canadian winter. They are heated primarily with human body heat and lightbulbs in the house. For additional warmth, there is radiant floor heating produced by a solar-powered geothermal heat pump. Since HVAC is almost totally eliminated, as are gas services and heaters, you actually save enough money to pay for the hyperinsulation. Passivhaus designs are being built for about $150 per square foot. Heating costs are near nil. The house would require hyperefficient appliances and solar panels, but again, these pay for themselves over the long run.

SYSTEMS:

This is where things get fun. The core of the farm is the people. The farm must supply food and utilities for the families, and take care of their waste products. Let’s start from the showers, shall we? Showers, sinks, and washing machines produce greywater. Greywater is dirty water that you can’t drink, but if you use the right soaps and detergents, plants can drink it. As a matter of fact, greywater treatment is a main feature of Earthships. It even occurs right inside the house, providing plants that clean the water as well as the air. The water is then used to flush toilets (because using drinking water for that is simply stupid). The treated greywater then gets flushed and becomes blackwater… that’s water, only with poo in it. The poo water goes to a methane digester, which produces both methane (natural gas) and natural fertiliser. Part of the input to the digester must be carbon-rich, and therefore sawdust and other biomass would occasionally be put in from foresting and farming activities. In order to back up the solar power units, the methane could be used to run not only the stove (with three families, there’s enough poo for a lot of methane for cooking), but a natural-gas powered fuel cell. One of these can make sure there is always enough current in the lines. Eventually the poo water becomes spent, and ends up as natural fertiliser on the Fukuoka-style grain fields. Eventually that grain becomes bread and beer, which continues the poo and pee cycle. Pee, by the way, should be separated from the poo by diverting toilets, because it is the perfect nutrient for an algaculture bioreactor – and also can be used directly on fields if diluted. Pee is really useful.

With people eating, there comes food scraps and other organic garbage. That stuff is great, and needs to be kept in the system as long as possible. Its first stop is to the black soldier fly buckets, where oodles of little creepy-crawlies reduce everything except cellulose. They can even eat meat and cheese and other milk products, stuff worms can’t eat. This system produces several products: heat, compost tea, compost, and black soldier fly larvae. There is a use for every one of those things. Heat is useful most of the time in Canada, so we’ll leave that be. Compost tea can be diluted and applied to the land as a very potent source of soil microbes to improve soil health. The compost is moved over to the next processing stage: vermiculture. Worms actually seem to prefer black soldier fly castings to raw foods, and they can process the cellulose that black soldier flies can’t. This process has been tested and it has been proven that not only are the two processes complimentary, the vermicomposting goes faster when the compost has been preprocessed by black soldier fly. This process produces vermicompost for the fields (a compost so rich that it should be mixed with other soil before applying to the ground), and compost tea. The black soldier fly and vermiculture units leave us with a surplus of creepy-crawlies with which to feed our tilapia in the aquaponics unit.

Aquaponics has been talked about before, but for the uninitiated, it’s a system that takes the best of aquaculture and hydroponics and puts them together. There is no cycling of water out of the system: fish poo fertilises planting trays, the nitrates are transformed into nitrites by the resident bacteria, the nitrites fertilise the plants, the plants thereby purify the water. The water can be cycled indefinitely as opposed to flowing through wastefully. The only input required is food, and worms and black soldier flies provide part of that. With an algae bioreactor, tilapia can also eat algae (for which they are adapted because of filters in their gills). Tilapia are omnivores that can truly eat anything. After all, they naturally occur with hippos because they can eat hippo poo. With constantly cycling and recycling nutrients, the only thing a person has to do for an aquaponics system is plant, maintain, and harvest. The amount of food produced by a small system is staggering… and it is tried and tested tech. The aquaponics system would require a greenhouse to be able to produce all year round. Yes, even in Canada, in minus 20 degree weather. How, you ask? Well, I have a mind to incorporate rocket stoves with thermal mass as well as a potential solaroof design. All possible, all tried and tested. With the aquaponics unit would come a flock of Muscovy ducks for pest control, meat, and eggs. Duck poo is perfectly welcome in an aquaponics system, and ‘scovies are at home on the range, capable of foraging and generally taking care of themselves. If necessary, chickens could be added to the system to add heat and carbon dioxide. An odd thing, you may think, to add to a greenhouse… but if it’s near airtight and plants consume CO2 to make sugars, you need a source of CO2 in the greenhouse. The added heat of the coop (as well as the eggs and pest control services) wouldn’t hurt.

A key to the functioning of the farm, then, would be water storage. A pond would be highly useful for not only water storage but production of biomass. Duckweed, a nigh indestructible water weed, is an exceptional converter of sunlight to protein, and can multiply on still water faster than you can say photosynthesis. Opening up a nice pond with duckweed on top would allow for green forage for the tilapia that can be frozen for storage over the winter. Another aquaponics enthusiast does this for his fish, and the nutrient composition of duckweed is superb for fish feed when supplemented with other stuff like black soldier fly (which, itself, is actually superior to most commercial fish feed). Additional water tanks for runoff collection would also be useful for dry periods.

What you see above is a reasonably brief discussion of some pretty nifty thoughts for just the central systems of the organic farm. A woodlot makes a great deal more activities possible, especially if it is maple. With a big enough woodlot, the income from sustainable forestry would also supplement the bottom line, and the use of a pyrolizer for heating in the greenhouse would produce not only heat but biochar – useful in making terra preta. On top of those things, an open expanse of clover would allow for beekeeping, a couple possible dairy cows, goats, you name it. That’s just gravy, as all the necessary calories are already being produced in the systems I’ve just talked about. Excess produce can be sold through the middle of winter. A little bit of cottage industry, and secondary products are also possible. Add in WWOOFers and farm vacationers, as well as weekend courses, the place can become quite an earning proposition.

So, that’s the basic idea. Any questions?

Pollination and Food Security

Now, most people will recognise that - if you work in a company that extracts resources - the best way to do it is to get workers who know their trade, extract resources safely and efficiently, and do so with minimum impact on their environment. It's of course a good idea to give your workers adequate safety gear so that the expertise you maintain in your workforce is protected from harm. A company that harms its workers physically or mentally is going to be hard pressed to hire more workers (well, unless the money's more important than all that). The case study of Chinese mining companies in Zambia shooting their workers when the workers militated for reasonable pay is perhaps the example of the worst way to maintain a cadre of loyal and productive workers in your company, perhaps doubly so because the Chinese mining company also found a way to make sure not one of those bosses was touched by the long arm of the law.

It's funny how corporations - entities described by one of my friends as being solely developed for the purpose of diffusing blame - are able to get away with treating their workers so badly. Well, there is a very troubling case of worker mistreatment going on in North America that is threatening the very food security we enjoy on our vast open expanses of farmland: the killing of millions of honeybees by pesticide use. Though USDA scientists have previously danced around the issue, the topic has been broached more openly at a DC luncheon where - while blame was not directly assigned to the people at Bayer - the causal lines could be drawn by the observant. What's more obvious is the fact that the UK is acknowledging the source of the problem directly and several nations in Europe have banned pesticides that have been shown to harm bees. Never mind the fact that the call to ban these pesticides is years old.

What really ticks me off is that we pay bees nothing and they provide - free of charge - both honey and an invaluable pollination service that secures our food resources but also allows for the multiplication of our biomass. We're shooting workers who work for free and provide us with two invaluable services. That's just bad labour relations strategy right there.

So food security is one of the most incredibly fundamental factors in the survival of a nation. China is exposing its Achilles' Heel by importing more than it produces in recent years. Food, as China has known from decades ago, is one of the most basic strategic resources. China instituted a draconian system of internal movement control called the Hukou system that was essentially used to force farmers to stay in the countryside and grow food. We need to understand food with the same level of importance. The world is running out of productive arable land, and we want to make certain we don't go hungry. If we kill off the honeybees each winter, our pollination services die with them, and with those services our biomass. The less we produce, the less we can export, the less we can use to feed ourselves. Scarcity will drive prices higher, and we will wonder what we thought we were saving by using pesticides in the first place, because in the end the cost to the consumer will be higher than that of a temporary crop failure due to pests. The long term economics of pesticide use equals high priced food plus pesticide. The lack of pesticide means higher priced food minus pesticide.

The math isn't that hard. Food will rise in price. We can control the why and the how, and in my mind, we save more money and time overall by eliminating pesticide rather than maintaining it.

Civil Society - Part 1: The People, Chapter I: Feedback

I have a bit of experience with turning disparate and occasionally disconnected information into useful analysis. It's hard. It takes a lot of work and three very rare things: a the ability to make and defend a thesis, a penchant for lateral thinking, and a great data storage/retrieval methodology. Yes, there are other qualities that make the production of reports and analysis better, such as expertise in one's craft, profound subject-matter knowledge, or broad-ranging interests; but starting from those three basic things, one can maintain a good data-synthesis capacity. In most organisations that do this kind of data-synthesis, they rely on individuals to put all this together. Perhaps individuals with small teams, but the typical "producer" of analysis is the analyst - a person. One single person. Bureaucracies and think tanks are constantly in need of more "processor power" to deal with all the information they collect and have to report on. Collection itself is onerous - requiring its own specific and hard-to-find skillsets - let alone the ability to synthesise data together into a useful piece of information. There will always be more data around than the group assigned to processing it will be able to process.

For example, in a classical intelligence operation, assets are run by an operator. The assets are key contacts that the operator uses to gather information to report back to either a handler or his operational unit at headquarters. The operations unit collates and synthesises the work of several operators into briefs and assessments that are then passed to a strategic unit. The strategic unit produces more broad or deep situational reports based on the briefs and assessments from the operational unit. This hierarchy of information gathering requires that at each level, the information gathered becomes more compact and dense. This requires skilled officers at every level to accomplish, and each level is mission-critical. Given the fallibility of humans, the efficiency of a trim organisation can occasionally be a weakness, and when possible, overlap and numbers help overcome this problem. With numbers comes the problem of a greater amount of information to handle, and we are back again at the beginning: the more data you have, the more people you need to parse it. Who better to collect and parse that information than the people you're parsing it for? The people.

PEOPLE POWER

Feedback: crowdsourcing monitoring of government initiatives

Feedback applies to everything a government does to maintain law, order, and a free flow of goods and people within and through its borders. Things like food safety inspections, water quality indexes, air pollution sampling, ice cores, soil monitoring, and even stuff as mundane as traffic flow analysis are all examples of data collection that the government performs to provide feedbacks for its initiatives. Every department of the government collects and maintains catalogues of indices and datapoints to better maintain its programs and make certain the public purse is being employed responsibly. All that data gets fed into huge and broad-ranging analysis to assist in steering the ship of state. That's why there's an entire department of the government called StatsCan, and it's a lot more important than people give it credit for. Monitoring what the government does is almost like a double expenditure on a program: not only does a department have to pay to implement a program, but they have to pay the administrative overhead to manage and measure its output. This is no small amount of money or manpower (expressed in "full time equivalents" or "FTEs").

It's important though, because fairness is expensive. Government must pay more for everything because it must be certain it acts without fear or favour. The process of establishing the need for an expenditure, securing budget for the expenditure, making a tender call, reviewing tenders, selecting a contractor, monitoring the performance of the contractor, assessing whether the final product meets specifications, and completing the contract (and yes, I left out a lot of steps there) must be reviewably fair, transparent, and equitable. Reviewably fair means there is a process established before the activity begins that explains how the process will proceed and why, and that all results of all steps of the process are recorded and judged as part of this established process. Transparent means that all stakeholders in the process must be given adequate and appropriate information for them to be able to take part in the process. Equitable means that no one stakeholder can have a privilege over any other stakeholder. That is, in a nutshell, what government has to do every time it does something. That means you don't simply pay for services, you pay for responsibility. That costs more than just services in the short run, but in the long run, actually costs less. A joke (from a country that shall remain nameless) explains why this is so:

"J", a member of the government of a (country that shall remain nameless) went to America to see how things were done. He visited the palatial mansion of a senator and asked the senator how he got so much money to buy such a lovely house. The senator took J to the porch and pointed to a bridge over the river. "You see that bridge?" said the senator, "I hired the contractors, got the money for double the value of the bridge from the treasury, paid the contractors and he kicked back half to me!" J was amazed. He went back to his homeland thoroughly edified.

Five years later, the senator went to visit his friend J. J, at that time, lived in a veritable resort village surrounded with parks and gardens, and was attended by all manner of servants. "Well, J," said the senator, "how did you get all this? I thought you weren't paid well at all by your government!" J smiled and pointed to a distant pair of mountain peaks. "Do you see that bridge, senator, there between the peaks?"

"No... I don't..." said the senator.

"Exactly!" said J.

In effect, we pay extra so that our government does what we ask it to. We are interested in our government doing what we ask it to because it means better services for us. In effect, it's in our own self interest to have established processes and feedbacks in order to make sure the public purse is being used effectively and efficiently. So this is good, right? Well, yes, actually, it is. Canadians get good governance, no matter what anybody says about it. You can make a low salary in Canada and still have all the security of fully paid medical services and education... and there's the added bonus that we don't have much social stratification. If you're a janitor, other Canadians don't think any less of you than if you were a car salesman or a pipefitter. In other countries, what you do establishes your social standing. In Canada, generally speaking, people's people. I really appreciate that.

Some feedback comes from civil society groups already. Think of Greenpeace, or Mothers Against Drunk Driving, or the Friends of Nose Hill Society. These are groups that band together to advance a given idea, or to defend laws that are already on the books. They have specific or broad interests, they develop expertise in their subject matter, and they effectively bring together hundreds of thousands of person-hours of work for free. In some cases, these civil society groups have direct input on policy. The Friends of Nose Hill certainly do. Some people take things to heart, and are willing to take their own personal time out to raise awareness, or advance a cause, or even just pick up litter. It's a part of civic pride, and such organisation is a civic virtue, whether it be to protect or oppose a given idea. The avenues by which these groups advance their aims are many and varied, but most deal with public education and awareness. If they want the government to do something, the typical way to do so is through unofficial - but broadly accepted and respected - channels such as a letter-writing campaign to the local MP/MLA/Alderman or a petition to the relevant department. There is relatively little in the way of official policy inputs that civil society groups can make, though all parts of government have places where people can give feedback.

So, to recap: this system of feedbacks is in our interest. The government does stuff, monitors it, measures it, reports on it, and has built-in methods of correcting things when they go awry. That's good. It's expensive, but it's good. It's also in our own self-interest for this monitoring to occur. Some groups even do monitoring and advocacy of their own for this very reason. This organisation of civil society is a profound virtue in a democratic society and should be cultivated and nurtured by government policy. This is because - if we really thought about it - wouldn't be in our own self-interest to get these groups to participate in monitoring in a more official way? Certainly not all of the monitoring and analysis... but couldn't the public contribute a little to lightening the load of government and adding to government's feedback systems? The answer is yes, and it requires two things: freedom of information and an effective procedure through which the feedback can happen.

I've already alluded to this in the previous section. Using civil society groups to monitor the management of feebates is simply a good way to make certain that the fox isn't left guarding the henhouse. The important thing is that the groups used to monitor and report on the projects implemented and the standards set by the government must adhere to strict procedure and exemplify the governmental qualities of fairness, transparency, and equity. This means they should be certified and registered with a central agency (or with the department responsible for the bailiwick in which they operate). It also means there must be very neatly-defined parameters for their feedback as well as clearly-stated process that the government must follow in the event feedback is generated.

For example: through engagement with the truffula society, the department of truffulas has determined that the thneed factory can only harvest 1000 truffula trees per year. The truffula society has the right to monitor truffula harvest by giving three days' advance notice to the thneed factory before inspection. Inspection may then proceed, and if all is in order, no problem. If the truffula society determines an overharvest has occurred, they flag this to the department of truffulas, which is then mandated by law to inspect themselves. If they find the truffula society was correct, a penalty is levied against the thneed factory, part of which goes to the truffula society for their services. If the truffula society raised a false positive, they would be given an administrative penalty for crying wolf. A certain amount of crying wolf would get them de-listed as a certified monitoring group, as would the flagrant abuse of their right to inspect (for instance, forcing work stoppages by inspecting every three days). So there would be a mode for redress from the thneed factory if they felt they were being improperly targeted. The truffula society would also have to agree to an open-books policy of allowing not only the government, but the thneed factory and the public, to view all their communications and reporting regarding truffula harvest monitoring. The main necessity is for fairness for both sides, but also the right to monitor must also be held inviolable. While excessive monitoring could be construed as unfair obstruction, regular monitoring should be expected. There should be no mechanism by which regular monitoring could be upheld or obstructed so long as it was not overly intrusive.

The benefits of this are manifold. The government gets free monitoring for certain initiatives and standards. They are then able to employ their overworked monitors in a more parsimonious and effective manner. The government spends less for more coverage, and would gain greater revenue from greater discovery of infractions against standards. Civil society, however, is the big winner - not simply from the fact that it would have more power and input - but from the fact that it gets immediate response from government regarding a subject that interests it. That direct action spurs on a culture of civic responsibility. When your action makes a positive (or even negative!) reaction, you are more likely to keep up the good work.

A government that gives more avenues for people to participate will be blessed with more popular participation. When the people feel empowered, they will be more likely to feel part of the process (and by extension, the solution) rather than separate from it. The civic pride that is engendered from simply doing the right thing will build and empower civil society to do more, and to speak more about the things that are important to it. That feedback will assist in making government more responsive to its people, and the virtuous circle can build on from there. How do you get the government's work done for free? Let the people in, by tapping into the flow of interest that already exists in society. That is how to harness feedback that improves the systems set in motion by the government.