Breeding a Better Chicken

SUBHEAD: Finding an happy outdoor chicken that lays a reasonable amount of eggs, breeds and is tasty roasted.

By Eatwell Farms on 8 August 2014 for CUESA -
(http://www.cuesa.org/article/breeding-better-chicken-eatwell-farm)


Image above: Nigel Walker of Eatwell Farms with chicks he hoping will "do it all". From original article.

While many conscientious eaters go out of their way to purchase pasture-raised eggs laid by happy chickens, it’s a little-known fact that almost all eggs have a hidden cost: millions of baby male chicks are killed each year at the hatcheries that raise egg-laying hens. Even humane, organic egg producers are reliant on these large hatcheries.

“It’s a dirty little secret, isn’t it?” says farmer Nigel Walker of Eatwell Farm in Dixon, California, who has ordered thousands of Production Red chicks each year for his diversified organic farm.

“Many customers have asked me about this practice, and I’ve been very truthful with them,” he says. “I’ve always been uncomfortable with it, but I wasn’t able to find a good solution until now.”

Earlier this week, Eatwell Farm launched a crowdfunding campaign on the online platform Barnraiser to start a chicken breeding program, which aims to eliminate the farm’s reliance on hatcheries. “We want to step up to the next level because we think it’s the right thing to do,” says Nigel.

Live Fast, Die Young
 Up until the last century, chickens were raised outdoors for the dual purpose of eggs and meat. Around the mid-twentieth century, breeders began to focus on developing specialized breeds for indoor industrial production. “These birds are selected to live in a house with 25,000 other birds with constant light and heat all year round,” Nigel says. “That’s not the environment we have in the fields.”

Popular meat breeds like the Cornish Cross have been bred for rapid growth, to the detriment of other characteristics such as longevity and disease resistance. “The average chicken in our country is processed [slaughtered] at 37 days,” says Jim Adkins, founder of the Sustainable Poultry Network in Old Fort, North Carolina. “If you and I grew at that rate, we would be 260 pounds by the time we’re two years old.”

Modern layers like the White Leghorn and Rhode Island Red are also bred for productivity: they lay 250 to 300 eggs a year. After about 14 months, they stop producing, making them virtually useless to a farmer, except for processing into chicken stock.

Because laying breeds don’t grow fast enough to be profitable for meat production, egg farmers have no incentive to raise the males, making them reliant on the hatcheries to replenish their flock every year. Once the chicks are sexed at the hatchery, the males are killed—ground alive, gassed, or otherwise disposed of.

Out of the Hatchery
A couple years ago, Nigel attended an Acres USA farming conference in Kentucky where he met Jim Adkins, who opened his eyes to a different way of raising chickens.

A bird enthusiast and hobbyist who had raised more than 50 different breeds of chickens, ducks, geese, and turkeys, Jim has seen all sides of the poultry industry. For several years, he was a supervisor at a large-scale turkey operation, where he witnessed the unsustainability of modern poultry breeding.  “I thought, ‘Something is wrong with this picture,’” he says.

In 2010, he founded the Sustainable Poultry Network, with the goal of restoring heritage breeds and training farmers to humanely and sustainably breed their own flocks. “We are on a mission to put the old breeds of poultry back to work,” he says. While such birds may produce fewer eggs and put on pounds more slowly than modern breeds, they tend to be more healthy, resilient, and productive in the long run.

Nigel hired Jim as a consultant to help him start a dual-purpose breeding program at Eatwell Farm. Eatwell is one of the largest operations Jim has worked with so far, but interest is growing.
“Nigel is definitely on the forefront,” says Jim. “To be able to breed your flock so it’s sustainable is a lot of hard work.”

Starting from Scratch
 For Eatwell, Jim recommended the Black Australorp, a dual-purpose breed with dark, shiny feathers. Last spring, Nigel bought 200 chicks (half male, half female) from a hatchery in North Carolina. When the Australorps arrived, they instantly took to the pasture and were more vibrant and alert than the Production Reds Nigel was accustomed to.

Jim chose seven males and 35 females to start the breeding families. “It’s a bit like heirloom tomatoes,” say Nigel, who is well-versed in saving seeds. “You select the ones that do really well in your environment.”

As the flock grows, the birds must be carefully tracked. Each time a hen goes to lay an egg, a door closes behind her (in what is called a trap nest) so that the bird and her egg can be recorded by Eatwell staff. The best of the best will be selected for hatching.

Nigel’s hope is that Eatwell will be able to replace their flock of nearly 3,000 Production Reds within the next two years, possibly sooner, and the farm will no longer have to purchase chicks from hatcheries. Whereas the Production Reds lay for only about one year, the Australorps are productive for at least three. The males will be raised to maturity and processed for meat, providing additional income for the farm. Nigel may also be able to sell his locally adapted Australorps to other farms in the area.

Raising the Barn
Completing such an ambitious project takes time and money that is not currently in the farm’s budget. The $20,000 requested on Barnraiser will help cover the costs of infrastructure, from incubators and nesting boxes to labor and consulting fees. (Pending additional funding, Nigel and Jim hope to develop a mobile app to help organize the breeding data and track flocks remotely, a tool that could be used by breeders across the country.)

This is not the first time Nigel has turned to his community for help in starting a new project. The farm originally set up its egg operation with financial help from his CSA members, who were demanding organic eggs. They quickly raised and loaned him $25,000, which was later paid back in full.

Today, the income from Eatwell’s eggs barely covers the costs of production, but chickens play an invaluable role in the farm’s ecosystem, having eliminated the need for compost and external fertilizers.

“The real core issue here is getting animals back on farms and out of these confinement operations,” says Nigel. “Yes, we want their eggs, and the meat is great, too, but the reason we have our chickens is that they eat the pasture and fertilize the ground. All our organic vegetables are grown with fertility from cover crops and chickens.”

He continues, “We’re trying to find a bird that can live outside, where it can express all of its chickenness, but still lay a very reasonable amount of eggs and make an absolutely tasty roast chicken.”

Look for Eatwell Farm at the Ferry Plaza Farmers Market on Saturdays. To learn more and support their fundraising campaign, visit Barnraiser.
Eatwell Farm photos by Jamie LeJeune and Eatwell Farm.

.

Why does life exist?

SUBHEAD: If you shine light on random clump of atoms for long enough, don't be surprised if you get a plant.

By Natalie Wolchover on 22 January 2014 for Simons Foundation -
(https://www.simonsfoundation.org/quanta/20140122-a-new-physics-theory-of-life/)


Image above: Jeremy England at the blackboard. From original article.

Popular hypotheses credit a primordial soup, a bolt of lightning and a colossal stroke of luck. But if a provocative new theory is correct, luck may have little to do with it. Instead, according to the physicist proposing the idea, the origin and subsequent evolution of life follow from the fundamental laws of nature and “should be as unsurprising as rocks rolling downhill.”

From the standpoint of physics, there is one essential difference between living things and inanimate clumps of carbon atoms: The former tend to be much better at capturing energy from their environment and dissipating that energy as heat. Jeremy England, a 31-year-old assistant professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has derived a mathematical formula that he believes explains this capacity.

The formula, based on established physics, indicates that when a group of atoms is driven by an external source of energy (like the sun or chemical fuel) and surrounded by a heat bath (like the ocean or atmosphere), it will often gradually restructure itself in order to dissipate increasingly more energy. This could mean that under certain conditions, matter inexorably acquires the key physical attribute associated with life.

“You start with a random clump of atoms, and if you shine light on it for long enough, it should not be so surprising that you get a plant,” England said.


Image above: Cells from the moss Plagiomnium affine with visible chloroplasts, organelles that conduct photosynthesis by capturing sunlight. From original article.

England’s theory is meant to underlie, rather than replace, Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection, which provides a powerful description of life at the level of genes and populations. “I am certainly not saying that Darwinian ideas are wrong,” he explained. “On the contrary, I am just saying that from the perspective of the physics, you might call Darwinian evolution a special case of a more general phenomenon.”

His idea, detailed in a recent paper and further elaborated in a talk he is delivering at universities around the world, has sparked controversy among his colleagues, who see it as either tenuous or a potential breakthrough, or both.

England has taken “a very brave and very important step,” said Alexander Grosberg, a professor of physics at New York University who has followed England’s work since its early stages. The “big hope” is that he has identified the underlying physical principle driving the origin and evolution of life, Grosberg said.

“Jeremy is just about the brightest young scientist I ever came across,” said Attila Szabo, a biophysicist in the Laboratory of Chemical Physics at the National Institutes of Health who corresponded with England about his theory after meeting him at a conference. “I was struck by the originality of the ideas.”

Others, such as Eugene Shakhnovich, a professor of chemistry, chemical biology and biophysics at Harvard University, are not convinced. “Jeremy’s ideas are interesting and potentially promising, but at this point are extremely speculative, especially as applied to life phenomena,” Shakhnovich said.

 England’s theoretical results are generally considered valid. It is his interpretation — that his formula represents the driving force behind a class of phenomena in nature that includes life — that remains unproven. But already, there are ideas about how to test that interpretation in the lab.

“He’s trying something radically different,” said Mara Prentiss, a professor of physics at Harvard who is contemplating such an experiment after learning about England’s work. “As an organizing lens, I think he has a fabulous idea. Right or wrong, it’s going to be very much worth the investigation.”

A computer simulation by Jeremy England and colleagues shows a system of particles confined inside a viscous fluid in which the turquoise particles are driven by an oscillating force. Over time (from top to bottom), the force triggers the formation of more bonds among the particles.

At the heart of England’s idea is the second law of thermodynamics, also known as the law of increasing entropy or the “arrow of time.” Hot things cool down, gas diffuses through air, eggs scramble but never spontaneously unscramble; in short, energy tends to disperse or spread out as time progresses.

Entropy is a measure of this tendency, quantifying how dispersed the energy is among the particles in a system, and how diffuse those particles are throughout space. It increases as a simple matter of probability: There are more ways for energy to be spread out than for it to be concentrated.

Thus, as particles in a system move around and interact, they will, through sheer chance, tend to adopt configurations in which the energy is spread out. Eventually, the system arrives at a state of maximum entropy called “thermodynamic equilibrium,” in which energy is uniformly distributed.

A cup of coffee and the room it sits in become the same temperature, for example. As long as the cup and the room are left alone, this process is irreversible. The coffee never spontaneously heats up again because the odds are overwhelmingly stacked against so much of the room’s energy randomly concentrating in its atoms.

Although entropy must increase over time in an isolated or “closed” system, an “open” system can keep its entropy low — that is, divide energy unevenly among its atoms — by greatly increasing the entropy of its surroundings.

 In his influential 1944 monograph “What Is Life?” the eminent quantum physicist Erwin Schrödinger argued that this is what living things must do.

A plant, for example, absorbs extremely energetic sunlight, uses it to build sugars, and ejects infrared light, a much less concentrated form of energy. The overall entropy of the universe increases during photosynthesis as the sunlight dissipates, even as the plant prevents itself from decaying by maintaining an orderly internal structure.

Life does not violate the second law of thermodynamics, but until recently, physicists were unable to use thermodynamics to explain why it should arise in the first place. In Schrödinger’s day, they could solve the equations of thermodynamics only for closed systems in equilibrium.

In the 1960s, the Belgian physicist Ilya Prigogine made progress on predicting the behavior of open systems weakly driven by external energy sources (for which he won the 1977 Nobel Prize in chemistry). But the behavior of systems that are far from equilibrium, which are connected to the outside environment and strongly driven by external sources of energy, could not be predicted.

This situation changed in the late 1990s, due primarily to the work of Chris Jarzynski, now at the University of Maryland, and Gavin Crooks, now at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

Jarzynski and Crooks showed that the entropy produced by a thermodynamic process, such as the cooling of a cup of coffee, corresponds to a simple ratio: the probability that the atoms will undergo that process divided by their probability of undergoing the reverse process (that is, spontaneously interacting in such a way that the coffee warms up).

As entropy production increases, so does this ratio: A system’s behavior becomes more and more “irreversible.” The simple yet rigorous formula could in principle be applied to any thermodynamic process, no matter how fast or far from equilibrium.

“Our understanding of far-from-equilibrium statistical mechanics greatly improved,” Grosberg said. England, who is trained in both biochemistry and physics, started his own lab at MIT two years ago and decided to apply the new knowledge of statistical physics to biology.

Using Jarzynski and Crooks’ formulation, he derived a generalization of the second law of thermodynamics that holds for systems of particles with certain characteristics: The systems are strongly driven by an external energy source such as an electromagnetic wave, and they can dump heat into a surrounding bath.

This class of systems includes all living things. England then determined how such systems tend to evolve over time as they increase their irreversibility. “We can show very simply from the formula that the more likely evolutionary outcomes are going to be the ones that absorbed and dissipated more energy from the environment’s external drives on the way to getting there,” he said.

The finding makes intuitive sense: Particles tend to dissipate more energy when they resonate with a driving force, or move in the direction it is pushing them, and they are more likely to move in that direction than any other at any given moment.

“This means clumps of atoms surrounded by a bath at some temperature, like the atmosphere or the ocean, should tend over time to arrange themselves to resonate better and better with the sources of mechanical, electromagnetic or chemical work in their environments,” England explained.


Image above: Frames from a computer simulation by Jeremy England and colleagues shows a system of particles confined inside a viscous fluid in which the turquoise particles are driven by an oscillating force. Over time (from top to bottom), the force triggers the formation of more bonds among the particles.

According to new research at Harvard, coating the surfaces of microspheres can cause them to spontaneously assemble into a chosen structure, such as a polytetrahedron (red), which then triggers nearby spheres into forming an identical structure.

Self-replication (or reproduction, in biological terms), the process that drives the evolution of life on Earth, is one such mechanism by which a system might dissipate an increasing amount of energy over time. As England put it, “A great way of dissipating more is to make more copies of yourself.”

In a September paper in the Journal of Chemical Physics, he reported the theoretical minimum amount of dissipation that can occur during the self-replication of RNA molecules and bacterial cells, and showed that it is very close to the actual amounts these systems dissipate when replicating.

He also showed that RNA, the nucleic acid that many scientists believe served as the precursor to DNA-based life, is a particularly cheap building material. Once RNA arose, he argues, its “Darwinian takeover” was perhaps not surprising.

The chemistry of the primordial soup, random mutations, geography, catastrophic events and countless other factors have contributed to the fine details of Earth’s diverse flora and fauna. But according to England’s theory, the underlying principle driving the whole process is dissipation-driven adaptation of matter.

This principle would apply to inanimate matter as well. “It is very tempting to speculate about what phenomena in nature we can now fit under this big tent of dissipation-driven adaptive organization,” England said. “Many examples could just be right under our nose, but because we haven’t been looking for them we haven’t noticed them.”

Scientists have already observed self-replication in nonliving systems. According to new research led by Philip Marcus of the University of California, Berkeley, and reported in Physical Review Letters in August, vortices in turbulent fluids spontaneously replicate themselves by drawing energy from shear in the surrounding fluid.

And in a paper appearing online this week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Michael Brenner, a professor of applied mathematics and physics at Harvard, and his collaborators present theoretical models and simulations of microstructures that self-replicate.

These clusters of specially coated microspheres dissipate energy by roping nearby spheres into forming identical clusters. “This connects very much to what Jeremy is saying,” Brenner said.

Besides self-replication, greater structural organization is another means by which strongly driven systems ramp up their ability to dissipate energy. A plant, for example, is much better at capturing and routing solar energy through itself than an unstructured heap of carbon atoms. Thus, England argues that under certain conditions, matter will spontaneously self-organize.

This tendency could account for the internal order of living things and of many inanimate structures as well. “Snowflakes, sand dunes and turbulent vortices all have in common that they are strikingly patterned structures that emerge in many-particle systems driven by some dissipative process,” he said. Condensation, wind and viscous drag are the relevant processes in these particular cases.

“He is making me think that the distinction between living and nonliving matter is not sharp,” said Carl Franck, a biological physicist at Cornell University, in an email. “I’m particularly impressed by this notion when one considers systems as small as chemical circuits involving a few biomolecules.”

If a new theory is correct, the same physics it identifies as responsible for the origin of living things could explain the formation of many other patterned structures in nature. Snowflakes, sand dunes and self-replicating vortices in the protoplanetary disk may all be examples of dissipation-driven adaptation.

England’s bold idea will likely face close scrutiny in the coming years. He is currently running computer simulations to test his theory that systems of particles adapt their structures to become better at dissipating energy. The next step will be to run experiments on living systems.

Prentiss, who runs an experimental biophysics lab at Harvard, says England’s theory could be tested by comparing cells with different mutations and looking for a correlation between the amount of energy the cells dissipate and their replication rates.

“One has to be careful because any mutation might do many things,” she said. “But if one kept doing many of these experiments on different systems and if [dissipation and replication success] are indeed correlated, that would suggest this is the correct organizing principle.”

Brenner said he hopes to connect England’s theory to his own microsphere constructions and determine whether the theory correctly predicts which self-replication and self-assembly processes can occur — “a fundamental question in science,” he said.

Having an overarching principle of life and evolution would give researchers a broader perspective on the emergence of structure and function in living things, many of the researchers said. “Natural selection doesn’t explain certain characteristics,” said Ard Louis, a biophysicist at Oxford University, in an email.

These characteristics include a heritable change to gene expression called methylation, increases in complexity in the absence of natural selection, and certain molecular changes Louis has recently studied.

If England’s approach stands up to more testing, it could further liberate biologists from seeking a Darwinian explanation for every adaptation and allow them to think more generally in terms of dissipation-driven organization.

They might find, for example, that “the reason that an organism shows characteristic X rather than Y may not be because X is more fit than Y, but because physical constraints make it easier for X to evolve than for Y to evolve,” Louis said.

“People often get stuck in thinking about individual problems,” Prentiss said. Whether or not England’s ideas turn out to be exactly right, she said, “thinking more broadly is where many scientific breakthroughs are made.”
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Interview with Ellen LaConte

SUBHEAD: Eco-economies are local and regional, place-based, functionally self-reliant, interdependent, mutually supportive, regenerative, restorative and resilient.  

By Robert Jensen on 8 March 2011 in Energy Bulletin -  
(http://www.energybulletin.net/stories/2011-03-08/listening-life-it%E2%80%99s-too-late-interview-ellen-laconte)

   
Image above: "Mother Earth" by Stephen Alcorn (2005). From (http://www.alcorngallery.com/Folklore/Folklore_display.php?i=4).
 
People of conscience face two crucial challenges today: (1) Telling the truth about the dire state of the ecosphere that makes our lives possible, no matter how grim that reality, and (2) remaining committed to collective action to create a more just and sustainable world, no matter how daunting that task. It’s not an easy balancing act, as we struggle to understand the scope of the crisis without giving into a sense of hopelessness.

Ellen LaConte’s new book, Life Rules (http://www.ellenlaconte.com/life-rules-the-book), is a welcome addition to the growing literature on these crises. The subtitle -- Why so much is going wrong everywhere at once and how Life teaches us to fix it -- captures the spirit of the book. LaConte offers an unflinching assessment of the problems and an honest path to sensible action. In an interview, I asked her to elaborate on her background and path to the insights of the book.

Robert Jensen: For me, your book came out of nowhere. I had never read an article by you or heard your name. So, as I read Life Rules and was so impressed with the breadth and depth of your analysis, I found myself wondering, “Who is she and where does she come from?”

Ellen LaConte: The short answer is that I’ve worked for almost 40 years as an old-school print writer and editor, mostly for small magazines, about organic gardening and farming, appropriate technologies, organizational communications, homesteading, history, education, alternative economics, evolution, democracy theory and practice, complex systems. I’m a generalist and seem instinctively to synthesize and simplify big ideas like those in Life Rules.

I like living a small-scale, small-pond, hands-on, quiet life. I had a paternal grandmother who lived on the remains of what had been a family farm in Pennsylvania Dutch country outside Lancaster and maternal grandparents who had a half-acre or so in north Baltimore that was dominated by my grandfather’s vegetable and fruit gardens.

I adored hanging out with him while he made compost, taught me about worms and ants and the living soil, talked to me non-stop about what he was doing and why. He was one of J.I. Rodale’s first fanatics (http://www.rodaleinstitute.org/history). I also grew up surrounded with books and magazines, was bookish pretty much from the start. I learned to love hand tools -- my grandfather had a workshop full of them -- and what was called “handiwork.”

My childhood was a perfect set up for the homesteading/owner-built/simplicity/self-reliance movement that in the 1970s -- when I was in my 20s -- seemed to me the most appropriate response to present and promised oil shortages, and a saner and more spiritually sound and grounded response to future shock than the globalized hi-tech, expansive, consumptive, grab-and-get one that also was popular in the ‘70s. It also suited my somewhat reclusive, contemplative nature.

Though my childhood was churched, Protestant, I didn’t really enter onto any kind of serious spiritual study or path until I was in my late 30s. I suppose I’d call myself a Tao, Zen and Sufi influenced Christian with decided mystical leanings. I somehow missed the 1960s, both the protest and the flower-power/drugs/sex/rock-and-roll parts. I don’t like crowds, noise, confrontation or argument. I lack both irony and edge, or maybe what’s called “edginess.” It’s my nature to want to fix things, smooth them over when possible, broker agreement or simply yield.

RJ: You say you don’t like confrontation or argument, but your book is a radical analysis, and you obviously realize that many -- maybe most -- people will argue with its thesis.

EL: I prefer writing about my convictions and worldview rather than explaining or arguing about them in real time. I don’t have a podium-proselytizing personality. Argument, even the constructive kind, is often reactive and impulsive. I’m emotionally impulsive enough by nature that I’ve learned -- or tried to learn -- that one ought to rein in one’s impulses and emotions about things as important as convictions.

The cartoon character Linus from “Peanuts” said, “I love mankind, it’s people I can’t stand.” I’m the flip side: I love people, it’s humanity I have a hard time with. I’ve always preferred and been fortunate to be able to work alone or with or for just one or two people. This, and my general disinterest in and ignorance about politics, seem contradictory for someone writing about community and democracy and promoting a deep Green movement. But it’s why I’ve been able to write about those things.

RJ: It does appear to be a contradiction. I assume you are suggesting that there are many different ways to contribute to making a better world. 

EL: I spoke recently to a college Philosophical Society about the book. I told them that it seemed to me that to love wisdom, to be philosophical in the truest sense, meant to be to some degree detached from day-to-day events, from immediate things. Not to be disinterested or unaffected, but less buffeted or influenced and consumed by them.

One of the reasons I could synthesize so much of what’s going wrong in the world now is that I’ve had time, as well as the calling and inclination, for it. I could stand back, meditate, read, engage in independent research, wait for understanding to come, question conventional assumptions, including my own, and look almost leisurely for the largest context in which we humans live our lives, which would be the context that should guide how we live our lives and deal with the Critical Mass of crises we presently face.

Given how caught up I get in other people’s lives, if I’d been busy organizing, protesting, working full tilt and full time, trying to respond to the needs and input of multiple colleagues, I’d have had less mental space and stamina to do that. I’d never arrived at the simple but elemental understanding that Life rules, we don’t.

RJ: Please explain that title. Do you mean that Life -- something bigger than us -- rules? Or that we need to follow Life’s rules? 

EL: Yes, both. The largest context -- the largest high-functioning complex system within which we live our lives -- is not the nation, nation-state system or global economic system but Life itself, the whole-earth, emergent and self-maintaining system of natural communities and ecosystems. That system, the ecosphere, teaches us the physical laws, the relationships and behaviors discovered in physics, biology and ecology and exemplified by the so-called “mystical” spiritual teachers, that we have to obey if we want to remain viable as a species.

We aren’t the ultimate authority, and none of the systems we’ve created possess ultimate authority. It’s Life that has created the physical conditions that make it possible for us to exist. We depend on Life for our lives. More specifically, we depend on Life as we know it for our lives, for the climate, resources, natural communities, and ecosystems that provide us with what we need to live.

Life has encoded in every other-than-human species a sort of protocol or blueprint of economic rules for survival, a set of behaviors and relationships that allow Life as we know it to live within earth’s means, to be long-term sustainable. In the physical/material realm on this planet, Life calls the shots. Life rules, we don’t. Other species have no choice but to obey those economic rules. We alone have a choice.

And lately, as a species living under the influence of a global economy that has, in the vernacular, gone viral, we’ve chosen pridefully and foolishly to break all the rules. The way we live in the present Global Economic Order -- capital G, capital E, capital O -- isn’t sustainable. It’s pathological. It works at cross purposes to everything small g, e and o -- “geo,” everything earthy. In particular, the GEO works at cross purposes to Life.

RJ: That sounds simple, almost simplistic, pointing out that humans live within an ecosphere that is governed physical laws and not limitless. But all around us in the First World is evidence of a society out of balance, apparently seized with the belief that we can defy ecological limits indefinitely.

EL: If you condense the 100,000 years or so that Homo sapiens sapiens, humans like us, have been around into the 24 hours of one day, the Global Economic Order has been in existence for less than a minute. We can live without a GEO, but we can’t live without or apart from Life as we know it. So we have two choices: We can forego our present economic model and choose to learn and obey Life’s economic rules.

Or we can choose not to. In which case Life will rule us out, adapt to our trespasses like an apple tree adapting to a lightening strike, and get on with its experiment in creating and sustaining more life just fine without us. Life rules, we don’t.

RJ: You suggest that because of the way the GEO works, we are close to a Critical Mass. What do you mean by that term?

EL: There’s actually a pretty good explanation for the now almost total disconnect between our perception of reality and our actual reality, between our sense as a species of being larger than Life and the inarguable fact that we are dependent on it for our very existence. Actually there are a couple of explanations.

One is money. Since we use money -- or its funny-money kin, such as credit and its ever-funnier-money kin like default swaps -- to acquire the things we need and want, we don’t provide those things for ourselves, we’ve lost track of where the things we need and want actually come from. We have little or no knowledge of the sources of our provisions or the damage done to living systems by the way we acquire them and the amounts of them we acquire.

We’ve put our faith in the economy’s ability to deliver what we need to us, so long as we have enough money. Money has come between us and substantial things -- the real goods, resources and ecosystem services that we actually need to live. Money has kept us from seeing the truth of our circumstances, which is that soon there will be insufficient fossil fuels, plastics, clean fresh water, forests, living soil, grains, seafood, congenial and predictable climate, functioning governments. You name it, we’ll run short of it ad infinitum.

Another explanation for our ignorance of the reality of our present circumstances is that most people have never heard of or taken seriously the limiting factor on a finite planet called “carrying capacity” -- the number of a species or a collection of species that an ecosystem can support long-term without suffering damage in excess of what the ecosystem itself can repair. In accounting, exceeding carrying capacity is called going bankrupt. That’s where we’re headed environmentally as well as financially right now. But most of us don’t realize that’s where we are yet because in those previous 23 hours and 59 minutes of human history we’ve either had more places -- more “New Worlds” to move to, conquer and plunder -- or new technologies that would do a better job of plundering the places we were in to provide for us.

We have just recently -- in, say, the last 30 seconds of that last most recent minute of human history -- hit that point in our global economic assault on living things and living systems both human and natural, that there’s no going back. We have just hit what I call Critical Mass, which is the name I’ve given what others are calling collapse, the tipping point, the long emergency, or bottleneck. It’s my name for our previously latent and slowly unfolding, now rapidly worsening planetary equivalent of HIV/AIDS.

RJ: That analogy to HIV/AIDS runs throughout the book, which may strike some as an odd comparison. Can you explain that?

EL: Critical Mass names a syndrome of converging, mutually-reinforcing environmental, economic, political and social crises that we think about and try to address as if they were separate and unrelated, but they are not. They are symptoms of one disease, a viral, a pathological global economy that is undermining the ability of human and natural communities -- Earth’s equivalent of an immune system -- to provide for, protect, defend and heal themselves the same way HIV undermines the ability of our immune systems to protect and heal us.

There are two pages in the book that compare HIV and the GEO, characteristic for characteristic, and the similarities are startling and frightening. I think we are presently at the HIV stage of the disease; it hasn’t quite yet become full-blown planetary AIDS. But I insist in the book that doing more of what we’ve been doing to exceed Earth’s physical means as well as our own fiscal ones -- in other words, trying to heal and grow the very kind and scope of economy that caused this disease -- is akin to injecting a patient who already has HIV with more HIV. That’s precisely what we’re doing.


RJ: From the diagnosis, I want to go back to the treatment plan, and your assessment of where the solutions to Critical Mass might be worked out. 

EL: Since all economies depend on earth and Life as we know it consistently and continuously delivering the goods -- resources, ecosystem services like living soils, pollination, marine fisheries, oxygen, carbon sequestration, air filtration, sufficient clean fresh water, a habitable, predictable climate -- then it seems to me the treatment plan has to be one that doesn’t exceed earth’s means of supporting us, doesn’t run against Life’s grain, and doesn’t compromise the health of the living systems. And the only examples of how to do that come from Life itself.

I argue in the book -- with support from geneticists, microbiologists, evolutionary theorists, and paleobiologists -- that the oldest and first living things, single-celled entities like bacteria, spent the first 2 billion years learning how to provide for themselves in ways that would be sustainable over the long term. When they did learn it -- after nearly putting themselves and the Life experiment on Earth out of business -- Life locked in, genetically encoded, what they’d learned.

Simply put, after going global and inducing the equivalent of our present Critical Mass three times, bacteria adopted a sort of Ten Commandments of Sustainability that can be synthesized for our purposes as five new behaviors. They went 5D: they downsized, diversified, decarbonized, dematerialized and, most importantly, they organized themselves in ways that are profoundly democratic.

Over the past 2 billion years, other-than-human living things have mastered the arts of solar energetics, recycling, sharing and interdependence, self-regulation, self-limitation, restrained competition, cooperation and collaboration, grassroots organization, self-governance, ecosystem management and -- this is profoundly important for us -- community building. Life is a cross-species, communitarian phenomenon. Their organically democratic eco-economies are local and regional, place-based, functionally self-reliant, interdependent, mutually supportive, regenerative, restorative and resilient.

The salient point is that Life and only Life can teach us how to live eco-logically, within Earth’s means. If we learn what Life teaches us and create lifeways that mimic Life’s ways, we can survive this round of Critical Mass we’ve induced and manage to avoid inducing it again. Janine Benyus wrote a book called Biomimicry that reported on and inspired a movement to copy, for example, the ways other species and living systems produce what they need sustainably. You could call what I’m suggesting in Life Rules radical or full-bore biomimicry.

RJ: Given how detached most of the contemporary world is from understanding, let alone mimicking, the natural world, is this realistic?

Adopting Life’s rules will require, of course, a huge transformation of the ways we think about our place in the community of living things and the ways we live. My book offers three chapters of examples of what we can do and some communities are already doing, if in a very preliminary way. We’ll need to revise what education is for, what needs to get taught and where, when and how learning needs to occur. I would suggest again that Life is the primary teacher, its economic, production, consumption, relational and organizational rules the curriculum.

The particular ecosystems -- the geographic places -- we live in and are presently destroying are the classrooms. And as Post-Carbon Institute Senior Fellow Richard Heinberg proposed in Powerdown, the most important and hardest lesson we will need to learn as a species is self-limitation. Where material consumption is concerned, “less is best” will absolutely have to replace “wars for more” as our collective ethical prime directive.

The good news is, if we take our cues from Life, if we decide to transform our ways of living and providing for ourselves, we don’t need governments as we know them or any sort of global agreement or institutions to begin and to succeed. Sustainability is by nature a grassroots undertaking. Both the learning and the mimicking can, and must, be engaged in particular places with the natural and human communities that live in those places. Life’s a collection of local phenomena, a community of communities, as John Cobb and Herman Daly propose in their books, for example, For the Common Good. If we need a goad to transformation, there’s this one: If we don’t choose to transform ourselves and our lifeways, Life will force us to. Life rules, we don’t, and Life will not hesitate to rule harshly and even rule us out.

RJ: Does that mean we have ugly times ahead of us?

EL: While there’s no reason to believe we will engage in this transformation willingly or that there will not be violence on the way to Life-likeness, a lot of communities around the country and in other countries have already begun to explore and experiment with aspects of Life’s Protocol for Economic Survival, though they don’t have my name for it yet.

The relocalization, Transition Town, post-carbon, 350.org, local currency, slow food, ecozoic and new economics movements, for example, all teach and apply one or more of Life’s lessons. Paul Hawken’s team at the WiserEarth website is creating a data base of information about organizations involved in movements like these. They’ve accounted for around 125,000 and think there may be twice that many. Hawken suggests we think of these organizations and their members as anti-bodies helping healing the planet’s immune system of this AIDS-like, economically induced disease I call Critical Mass. These organizations and movements represent a starting point.

But a viable treatment plan for this virulent, life-threatening, economically-induced syndrome of crises cannot engage in just one or two or even three of the 5Ds, and cannot engage in them scattershot or only to a degree that doesn’t upset business as usual. Eco-logic requires that we incorporate, integrate, and practice all of Life’s rules, that we stop behaving as if we were larger than or apart from Life and become constructive participants in it.

RJ: It seems clear that the kind of change you describe as necessary is not possible within capitalism and that capitalism is a serious impediment to such change. Earlier you said we have to “forego our present economic model,” but not all the movements and experiments you mention are anti-capitalist. How do you negotiate that?

EL: I kept religion, politics, parties, personalities and “ism” analysis pretty much out of the book in order not to allow any of those divisive topics to set up straw figures and distract readers from the central point: By present economic methods and models, we are living beyond earth’s means. I suggest in the book that unregulated, growth-dependent capitalism only appears to succeed because it has been enabled by the mechanisms of globalism to have the whole earth at its disposal and by the machinations of the Powers to make grab-and-get/pillage-and-plunder its operating principles.

Once it has been globalized, the one thing a capitalist economy can’t be is not-global. And as a globalized phenomenon, it cannot help but exceed earth’s means of supporting it. It is the globalization of the capitalist -- and, I would add, colonialist -- industrial economy that is doing-in Life as we know it. And as I also suggest in the book, the system is too big not to fail since the resource base -- or, to retrieve my HIV/AIDS analogy, the host planet -- it depends on is finite. When AIDS sufficiently ravages a human patient’s body, the virus dies along with the patient. Consequently, along with ecosystems, species, human and natural communities, human lives, quality of life, and Life as we know it -- the global capitalist economy itself is in its terminal stages.

Taking on capitalism head on would have gotten up the backs of too many potential readers. And while they might waste time arguing the merits of capitalism or arguing the possibility of no-growth capitalism, they cannot successfully argue the merits of a globalized economic system of any kind. Globalized bartering or socialism or communism would equally challenge the earth’s human and natural communities and the biosphere’s functioning. Kirkpatrick Sale and E.F. Schumacher had it right: Scale matters and where sustainability is an issue, which in the matter of human survival it is, small is not only beautiful but self-limiting, survivable, and sustainable.

So, no, not all the movements and examples I mention in the book are anti-capitalist. The measure of an experiment’s success is not that it is anti-capitalist but that it works in harmony with living systems, and in the ways that living systems work. An experiment need not be in and of itself the cure for Critical Mass but is exemplary of one or more elements of Life’s Economic Protocol for Survival, which as I’ve said, would lead us to integrate and obey all of Life’s rules.

Doing that would automatically move us away from capitalism as we know it and probably from any conceivable model of capital as an economic end-all and be-all. Provisions themselves are what we need to live, not the funny-money with which we presently purchase them if we are lucky enough to have any.
 
RJ: Perhaps that is the bottom line: What we need to live. Perhaps that’s an appropriate last question. What do you, Ellen LaConte, need to live?

EL: Much less than I presently have and very much less than is currently available to me if I were willing to use credit to acquire it. Like everyone else, I need food, clean air and water, clothing, some sort of shelter, preferably warm in winter, occasional medicine or medical care, spiritual and physical exercise, colleagues, friends, family, if possible books, lots of quiet, a garden to work in, woods and wild not too far off. To love and be loved. To carry no debt. To believe there is some sort of livable, desirable future for the next seven generations. I’ve been fortunate never to lack for these.

To be happy, I need good work to do, work that I feel is, in my late mentor Helen Nearing’s terms, “contributory.” (See a review of LaConte’s book about Nearing, On Light Alone, http://www.yesmagazine.org/issues/sustaining-watersheds-of-the-pacific-n...)
I have, in addition, most of what most middle and upper-middle class Americans have.

My partner and I have a house that in absolute terms is bigger and less efficient than I’d like, a car, the usual appliances (though we are not appliance or gadget sophisticates), a computer, a television, arts and entertainment if I choose to access them, electricity, running water, public services (for the time being), air-conditioning, various kinds of insurance, every kind of retail outlet you can think of within five miles or so, most of which I never patronize. I do not need these things, but I have them. Or, more accurately, they and the economic system of which they are the accoutrements have me.

Thus, I need periodically to contemplate what I have that I don’t need, what harm having it causes and whether I’m willing to discomfort myself and my partner enough to un-have it, or at least some of it.

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Adaptation to the Long View

SUBHEAD: We almost never ask whether the cure might end up being worse than the disease.

 By Kurt Cobb on 18 July 2010 in Resource Insights -  
(http://resourceinsights.blogspot.com/2010/07/adaptation-and-long-view.html)
 
 
Image above: An 18th century village in Himachak, India, features th Pujarli Hindu temple. From (http://himachal.us/2005/03/18/hidden-himachal/91/media/photo-news/avnish).

One blade of grass is vulnerable to all sorts of shocks: drought, flood, infestation, and various human interventions including plowing and herbicides (if it's not the kind of grass a groundskeeper wants). But the whole family of grasses would be hard to eliminate. They are so various, so well adapted to their habitats, so ubiquitous in their reach. In short, they are excellent examples of organisms conditioned by millions of years of natural selection, nature's form of trail and error. That's the long view of adaptation.

Then, there is the human view. We are a species with a short history--perhaps at most 500,000 years. Our natural way of living--hunting and gathering--has been superseded by agriculture only in the past 10,000 years. And, our industrial way of life might be said to have begun a little over 200 years ago. And, yet we imagine that the least tested of our human systems of adaptation is somehow the most robust. One of the latest adaptations in industrial society has been the microchip, now only about 70 years old with widespread application only about 30 years ago.

Like a pioneer species it has spread quickly and is now ubiquitous in the modern world which could not function without it. We know its vulnerabilities including susceptibility to electromagnetic pulse, coding errors such as the Y2K or Year 2000 problem, malicious software that can not only commandeer computer resources but also destroy hardware, and a high degree of connectivity through the Internet that makes the spread of software-related problems easy and fast. And yet, we build an ever more complex world completely dependent on it.

We are now experimenting with even more destabilizing technologies such as nanotechnology, genetic engineering, and robotics that computer scientist Bill Joy suggested might endanger the entire human species and perhaps many other species as well.

This understanding and the gathering problems of fossil fuel depletion and climate change have led some groups to suggest that new technology may not be the most adaptive path. The worldwide integration and homogenization of technology might be analogized to a monoculture, highly susceptible to a complete failure in the way that the grasses of the world discussed above are not. So often we hear that technology will solve this or that problem and increasingly that it will solve global climate change and rescue us from fossil fuel depletion.

And, many of us have become conditioned never to think of the possible downsides of this technology. We almost never ask whether the cure might end up being worse than the disease. Part of the problem is that the threats to the sustainability of human civilization are rushing toward us so fast that we simply don't have the time to do what nature does, namely, weed out poor adaptations over thousands of years.

Nor do we seem to understand the risks we are running because of our highly interconnected society. Fatally flawed adaptation strategies won't just imperil an isolated population in one segregated locale.

Rather, poor strategies have the potential to bring down all of modern civilization. The optimists say that such risks are overblown, that so far all the concern about technology bringing us to our knees has been for nothing. But a fair reading of the data on climate change, fossil fuel depletion, soil depletion, water depletion, biodiversity destruction, and myriad other measures tells a different story.

What the optimists mean is that human populations are still growing and flourishing. What they leave out is that the natural systems upon which those populations depend for their survival are being swiftly degraded. We are like the proverbial man falling from the 100-story building who, when asked how things are as he passes by the 50th floor, says, "Fine."

The wiser course may be to return to the type of systems that have shown themselves to be more resilient through history: smaller settlements with more decentralized production of goods and services, broader participation in the growing of food and the production of goods, reliance on renewable energy such as wind and solar, and a society that designs its objects to make the full cycle from "cradle to cradle." This doesn't mean abandoning all new technology.

It means developing technology that will stand the test of time based on known principles of resilience and sustainability and will do so without risking the wholesale destruction of humanity.

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