Shifts and Devices

The limits of ‘Just in Time’ delivery systems are becoming apparent in the form of empty shelves in the rice sections of local supermarkets, as the knock-on effect of global shortages is amplified by the lack of resilience in our food distribution system.

I suspect a combination of factors are in play that may make our food system far less stable and reliable than we believe:

• Just in Time delivery means that there is no redundant supply on hand to buffer runs on a particular food item. Shelves empty, and don’t refill until the next truck arrives.
• Globalized food speculation, production and distribution systems mean that food staples are not regionally insulated from each other. Shortages in the Asia rice markets cascade through to the Texas/California growing regions far more rapidly than in the past.
• Information and communication technologies, including both web and legacy media (WSJ, CNBC) propagate knowledge rapidly and effectively, giving more people in more places the ability to act rapidly on accurate and important information.

The combination of these factors forms what Thomas Homer-Dixon calls a tightly coupled network or system, prone to brittleness and rapid cascading failure.

The current shortage cycle is initially driven by heavy users of rice, such as extended families, small restaurants, and small retailers attempting to insulate themselves against rapid price rises by stocking up in advance, based on the information they have about future price and availability. However this creates a positive feedback loop, with medium and small users of rice picking up an extra bag to ensure they have enough for their family needs. Not a big deal in a storage-based system – but a serious problem in a JIT system, where every surge of purchases empties the shelves, and sets the stage for the next round of shortage.

Shortage in one staple creates concern about others, and with all grains in short supply worldwide, the ‘rice run’ could easily jump the shelves to create repeated runs on flour, pasta and other staples.

The result is a crystal-clear example of the pursuit of capitalist efficiency through ’JIT’ leading to a brittle and failure-prone system where any contraction at all in of the system inputs leads directly to cascading failure.

The solution is also clear: we need a less efficient (more redundant, lower-velocity, less tightly integrated) food system. And the same applies to any life of our support systems: When it comes to the things that really matter for survival, efficiency is the enemy of effectiveness.

I’ve been mucking around with vegetable gardening for a decade, without showing any real talent for it, but this year I’ve decided to focus hard on the humble potato, and see just how many pounds of them can be grown more or less organically in 4 x 8 raised beds.

I spent several weeks in November running around the neighbourhood with a wheelbarrow collecting the leaves people here bag up for disposal every fall, and stacking them in growing frames, with the hope that the leaves will have partially composted by spring, when I will get some seed potatoes and plant out several beds.

I plan to try some different techniques for growing spuds in each bed, and see which yield the best results in these small raised beds.

If some of these urban spud experiments work, by next year I might have a reasonable system down that I can share with others, and maybe help friends and neighbours grow some healthy calories in small spaces built of scrap wood.

Science fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson has a long interview on BLDGBLOG, that is well worth the read. An excerpt:

… if you think about sustainability, then you can start thinking about permaculture and what permaculture really means. It’s not just sustainable agriculture, but a name for a certain type of history. Because the word sustainability is now code for: let’s make capitalism work over the long haul, without ever getting rid of the hierarchy between rich and poor and without establishing social justice.

Sustainable development, as well: that’s a term that’s been contaminated. It doesn’t even mean sustainable anymore. It means: let us continue to do what we’re doing, but somehow get away with it. By some magic waving of the hands, or some techno silver bullet, suddenly we can make it all right to continue in all our current habits. And yet it’s not just that our habits are destructive, they’re not even satisfying to the people who get to play in them. So there’s a stupidity involved, at the cultural level.

BLDGBLOG: In other words, your lifestyle may now be carbon neutral, but was it really any good in the first place?

Robinson: Right. Especially if it’s been encoding, or essentially legitimizing, a grotesque hierarchy of social injustice of the most damaging kind. And the tendency for capitalism to want to overlook that – to wave its hands and say “well, it’s a system in which eventually everyone gets to prosper, you know, the rising tide floats all boats, blah blah” well, this is just not true.

We should take the political and aesthetic baggage out of the term utopia. I’ve been working all my career to try to redefine utopia in more positive terms – in more dynamic terms. People tend to think of utopia as a perfect end-stage, which is, by definition, impossible and maybe even bad for us. And so maybe it’s better to use a word like permaculture, which not only includes permanent but also permutation. Permaculture suggests a certain kind of obvious human goal, which is that future generations will have at least as good a place to live as what we have now.

Robinson’s thinking in many ways parallels that of John Michael Greer at The Archdruid Report, one of the most thoughtful and challenging of the blogs examining the prospects for ‘post-carbon’ civilization.