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Re: Permaculture in a Burr Oak Nutshell
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Subject: Re: Permaculture in a Burr Oak Nutshell
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From: thomas@class.com.au (Thomas Beale)
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Date: 9 Oct 1996 03:33:09 GMT
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Article: 15228 of alt.sustainable.agriculture
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Distribution: world
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Newsgroups: alt.sustainable.agriculture
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Organization: Class Technology
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References: <Pine.GSO.3.93.961001120340.25807A-100000@rainbow.rmii.com>
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Reply-To: thomas@class.com.au
In article <Pine.GSO.3.93.961001120340.25807A-100000@rainbow.rmii.com>, intellid@rainbow.rmii.com (Kathie Priebe) writes:
>While I respect and admire what I understand to be the philosophical basis
>of 'permaculture', I find your conclusions regarding the implications of
>'decentralized infrastructure' to lack logical rigor. I do not see how
>creating and functionally duplicating these services on a 'neighborhood'
>level results in 'adoption of appropriate technologies', 'energy
>conservation', 'constructed wetlands'.
>
>Regarding the 'generation of pollution', to me this seems constant for the
>same number of people supported and does not depend upon centrally managed
>resources vs locally managed resources. I could imagine, in fact, that
>centrally managed resources are more efficiently distributed, thus
>consuming less energy.
First thing to note: there is not a binary choice between "centralised" and
"localised". A better concept is to think of a hierarchy of scopes, or cell
sizes at which given activities should be pursued, with these two as the
extremes.
Now, to your argument: I will assume "centralised" means really
centralised (state-wide or similar), and "local" means really local
(e.g. viallage or house). Pollution would normally be worse with
centrally managed. The reasons are:
a) the total distribution costs are higher;
b) while there may be some efficiency gains in having one centralised
production facility rather than N local production facilities,
the very size of the centralised one usually means it has to be
technological (i.e. industrial) in nature, thus it consumes fossil
fuel, other resources, and produces pollution. The local production
means may very well be natural, and produce no real "pollution"
at all.
Try this thought experiment:
Problem: produce 25 dozen eggs and distribute 1 dozen to each of 25
households (consumers), which are situated in groups of 5
on circles of 1km radius, each centred on say a local shop;
these circles are evenly spaced around the periphery
of a circle of 20 km radius. (This funny configuration
is just intended to approximate scattered households.
The symmetry is just to make the calculations simple.
Try drawing it on paper).
Centralised solution:
Production: 1 factory (battery) at the centre of the 20 km
circle.
Distribution: 5 distribution lines to the centres of
the 5 small circles (each 20 km in length); 5 1km
distribution lines from each small circle centre to the
5 households (i.e. a total of 25 of these 1 km roads).
Cost to produce: some amount of energy, probably
electric, therefore some pollution.
Cost of production infrastructure: the cost of the factory, in
resources (building materials, fuel, etc etc).
Cost to distribute: 5 x 5 dozen x 20 km + (factory to shops)
25 x 1 dozen x 1 km (shops to homes)
= 500 + 25 = 525 dozen egg kilometres
(convert this to fuel, wages etc)
Cost of distribution infrastructure:
5 x 20 km + 25 x 1 km = 125 km roads. Roads are
_very_ expensive... (in terms of resources). Now,
to be fair, we will assume the egg people are only
one of 100 users of these roads, so we will divide
the cost here (whatever it is) by 100. It will still
be big.
(say) 5 big trucks for the factory -> shop run,
and say 5 small trucks for the shop owners to do
the local run.
Localised solution:
Production: a chook run at each house can produce a dozen
eggs.
Distribution: pretty obvious....
Cost to produce: in terms of non-renewable resources,
probably 0.
Cost of production infrastructure: = resource cost of 25
chook runs. Probably some old bits of timber, iron, the
usual thing. Assume they built it by hand, so no pollution.
Cost of distribution: 0 dozen egg kilometres.
Cost of distribution infrastructure: 0
Without getting pedantic about the details in this imaginary example,
it is easy to see the difference. The moral here is that egg production
is relatively simple, and _can_ be done at a local level. Also, in the
centralised example, the unrecoverable resource costs of production
far outweigh the same costs incurred in the local version.
Now, the above example has the individual households producing eggs.
Not everybody might want to do that. The "shop" level, above, might be
the better level. The point is, one can't be prescriptive about how human
activities should proceed, in order to achieve sustainability. What we
can do however, is to recognise certain facts about each activity, and
use these to determine an appropriate level at which such activities
should take place, for sustainability.
For example, an endeavour such as the construction of a computer, or an
energy generation and delivery infrastructure is a different problem
altogether: they are (or seem to be) inherently complex. There is a
certain minimum scope, or population cell size to which these are
likely to be applicable, or even possible.
In general, some of the factors to be considered in determining the
appropriate level are as follows:
- innate level of complexity. This will dictate a minimum size.
Whether comlexity is due to a minimum level of intellectual
specialisation (not every individual can be a doctor or can
build their own computer), or to do with resources, and the
need for cooperation (e.g. a university makes no sense at the
household level. Nor does a hospital.)
- costs of distribution, consumption, collection and waste
disposal versus costs of production (as always, "costs" here
is in terms of resource usage; note that resources include
"pollution absorption"). These costs should be much lower
than the costs of production, if not, this represents
_inefficiency_ in resource usage.
However, there is more to the problem than just determining the
appropriate level for an activity. The _way_ it is carried out, i.e.
the structure and dynamics is important as well. It is here that we
learn from natural living systems, which are in general sustainable,
and often show the following characteristics:
- self-organisation
- self-regulation (i.e. there is feedback control on resource usage).
The Gaia hypothesis is about self-regulation for both living
and non-living systems.
- communication mechanisms inside cell of activity (this is
a complex area, but examples include insect pheromone
communication, and chemical diffusion communication)
- _efficient_ use of resources
- inherent complexity (diversity of species and connections);
- etc
These give us some basic design principles for building a human
system. For example, the complexity principle should lead us away from
monocultures and toward polycultures, which is one of the reasons why
permaculture looks very promising. The self-organisation and internal
communication principles lead to systems which have inherent stability
in the long term, despite diverse problems which might occur (e.g.
floods, disease, invasion). Self regulation is also extremely
important - it is how the system "knows" about its resource usage.
Compare for example village living using local resources with the
globalised commodity version we have today - all feedback loops are
broken (e.g. people in Japan have no idea of their resource footprint),
there is little internal communication in communities, since
"communication" has been turned into solely economic transactions with
centralised organisations such as giant surpermarket chains, and
resource usage is anything but efficient. One needs to go no further
than the idea of a can of coke or a packet of chips to see that (let
alone the really big things!).
The question of energy originally raised in this thread is an interesting
one: there are multiple "designs" or "implementations" possible - one
being centralised generation (e.g. via hydro, solar) + extensive distribution
(much like what exists today), another being home generation (everyone
has their own solar or wind generator or whatever, + boxes of electronics),
yet another being village generation + local distribution network. To
determine where to go, a study of each solution needs to be done based
on some of the principles (design criteria) mentioned above. So it is
not simple. By the way, there are some good reasons to generate power in a
partially centralised network: power quality is easier to achieve than
by doing it yourself.
>>
>> The implications of a decentralized infrastructure includes:
>> - widescale adoption of appropriate technologies;
>> - homes and neighborhoods designed for energy conservation
>> and solar-orientation; landscapes for shade and cooling;
>> - on-site energy production with solar, wind, water,
>> geothermal heat pumps;
>> - home gardens, kitchen gardens, community gardening,
>> urban agriculture, wayside gardening, solar greenhouses,
>> market gardens, foodwebs and foodsheds, and adoption of
>> biological farming, organic farming and gardening,
>> edible landscapes, agroforestry, and polycultures;
>> - composting toilets, urine collection and re-use as
>> fertilizer, greywater, constructed wetlands, Living
>> Machines (aquatic solar ponds);
>> - worm composting of food scraps and cellulose (junk
>> mail, food wrappers, cereal boxes, newspaper); and
>> integration of poultry to shred and mix manure with
>> cellulose trash used as bedding
I would go along with a lot of these, but they need to be recognised
as solutions, rather than a statement of any particular problem. They
fit into designs conceived using some of the ideas above.
>>
>> Centralization of infrastructure is energy intensive and inherently
>> prone to generation of pollution. Secondly, decentralization lends
>> itself to cottage industries, jobs, and distribution of
>> wealth.
>>
Hope these ideas are useful in the discussion.
- Thomas Beale