Congruous & Modular

I've been asking myself the question: does it make any sense to have a local economy as a goal? Can local economies still work? Or is the whole "buy local" trend just a nostalgic or even irresponsible fantasy? Has our population even here in Ka'u over-grown to the point where we must have global economies of scale for all of us to survive?

In the big picture, there's no doubt that we need industrial agriculture, with its complex set of technologies and skills, to continue to make enough calories available to all or famine will happen. At the same time our global system of production and distribution has become rigid and therefore inefficient. It also supports and is supported by a certain world-view which is overly simplified and therefore, basically, stupid. A lot of people growl about corporations, but there's nothing wrong with corporations in and of themselves. Corporations, big and small, are just one way to organize people and materials. It is the world view - the culture - that undergirds global corporations (and hedge funds and credit-derivative swaps) that is so ridiculous. Ridiculous because blindered and short-sighted. Ridiculous because sterile, obsessive, neurotic. Does anyone like to live in a McDonalds, an office tower, or a strip-mall? The stripped down environments that this world view generates just plain suck. They really are like malignant tissue.

Bryan Fagan's book draws strong connections between rigid, top-heavy, and overly centralized civilization and the inability to adapt to the challenges which extreme weather such as El Nino inflicts. Our business culture certainly has become overly rigid (banks "too big to fail") and top-heavy (bonuses), and definitely over-centralized (just try to start a small business).

Here's the weird thing from a food producer's point of view: the more involved you become with our modern system of processing and distribution, the less -pound for pound - the stuff you produce is worth. Why? Because your carrots, corn, cucumbers, or in my case, beef have to carry the weight of the entire structure, the top-heavy and elaborate structure of distributors and government regulators, bankers and insurance salespeople, truckers, grocery-store clerks, food writers, chefs, graphic designers, window-washers, janitors, etc, etc, etc. To support all that there is a relentless pressure to drive down the costs of the actual stuff that the system exists to distribute. It's the opposite of adding value. The structure overwhelms the content. And so we have CAFOs and GMOs, giant slaughterhouses and illegal alien farm-workers. It's not somebody else's problem. We are all implicit and complicit. And it is all much more fragile than most people realize.

Which gets me back to the title of this piece: congruous & modular. Which is how I am breaking down that the all-too-ubiquitous concept of "sustainability" in my mind. I think we should aim to build systems that are congruous with the scale and character of communities and regions, that are congruous with local values, the local environment, and the particular carrying capacities of local natural resources. We also need to build flexibility into our systems by making them more modular (rather than centralized, consolidated, or global) in character. As well as being flexible, modular systems are also more human-scale, and therefore have the ability to tap into the creativity of individuals more completely, which really is a profoundly under-utilized natural resource at present. These are both time-tested grass-roots survival strategies, of course, nothing new. But I think congruous and modular - which local systems generally are- is the way to go.

Books

I just read Flat-Broke in the Free Market: How Globalization Fleeced Working People by Jon Jeter. He argues that globalization and especially the "neo-liberal" free-trade regimens imposed on developing economies by the IMF and World Bank have destroyed local, regional, and national economies by flooding them with cheap foreign goods. Sound familiar? Jeter's antidote: government investment in infrastructure, worker education, and research, regulated trade, higher taxes, and...Hugo Chavez (!?)

Then I read The New Mediterranian Diet Cookbook, which has really yummy sounding recipes, but I still found it annoying because of that tone which people adopt when they live in farmhouses in Cortona, Italy and they like to rub your face in it. And then they want you to have all these different cheeses and olives on hand to sprinkle everything with, as if everybody has time for hunting down ricotta salata.

Ka'u has amazing things to eat and they just kind of show up, if you've lived here long enough and been reasonable civil to everyone. Like pink and red mempachi (squirrelfish) with their big black eyes, to salt & fry crispy or make into soup with ginger, onions, and tomatoes. Just as ravishing.

Now I'm reading Floods, Famines, and Emperors: El Nino and the Fate of Civilizations by Brian Fagan (so far, amazing.)

Free Enterprise

There are certain things that just feel good to do. One of those things, for me, are farmer's markets. I like being a vendor even more than being a customer. It is gratifying in that way that very basic human technologies feel right - you sense the echoes of thousands of years of doing this. There is nothing self-alienating about it; on the contrary, one of the big by-products of a farmer's market is a very rich sense of healthy human connections. It is community development in the very best sense. Casual, voluntary, not a government program.

Too often "community development"programs are just so seriously boring.

My daughter loves farmer's markets as well. She is working on getting the skills to do a transaction by herself. It's a fantastic learning environment. She will have a better intuitive sense of how a healthy economy actually works at 9 than I probably had at 19, maybe even 29.

There is a lot to be said for decentralized local food production, but for certain essential items of modern existence a "global" system is the way to go. There is no question that large-scale commodity production and distribution is much more efficient for a lot of things, if not everything.For instance you just can't grow wheat efficiently in Hawaii. Too humid, too much slope, acid soils etc. But everybody like bread - and automobiles and cell phones.

But our global system teaches us all to be stuck-in-self-gratification-mode consumers or beast-of-burden producers. It turns money into a math game untied from the human societiesthat money is meant to serve as a tool. We become opaque to ourselves, we don't even know how what we consume relates to what we produce, or what exactly it is that we produce. We lose the ability to make mental connections - to see our society or even our communities as a whole, and to believe in ourselves.

The kind of free enterprise that a farmer's market encourages is a beautiful antidote to the global system and the mindset that comes with it. It's a lot of fun and full of yummy things, too.

Berry's Husbandry

From Wendell Berry's "Renewing Husbandry:"

Soon the majority of the world's people will be living in cities. We are now obliged to think of so many people demanding the means of life from the land, to which they will no longer have a practical connection, and of which they will have little knowledge.....The problem of renewing husbandry, and the need to promote a general awareness of everybody's agricultural responsibilities, thus becomes urgent.

Part of the problem is that so far the movement towards a new agriculture - locally adapted, deeply rooted in place, small, resilient, human-scale - has been consumer-driven. It's been a foodie/Yuppie phenomenon. The farmers, and I'm talking the kind of farmers who have farming in their blood, farmers from farming families, have been terribly marginalized in all this.

Farmers don't talk a lot, and they really don't blog a lot. If you're talking, you're not farming.

It takes tremendous focus and self-discipline to farm sucessfully. I'm talking about farming as a profession here, not as farming as a hobby. Straight-up commercial farming, not experimental farming that is supported by the government, not farming as a setting for agri-tourism or eco-tourism. Not that I have anything against any of that. I'm talking about the farmer-farmers who grit their teeth and get the food out into the world. They are the backbone of any civilizational achievement, always. They produce. We need to make the effort to listen to them and rebuild our economy starting from the ground up. We need to support farmers with the same intensity (or more) as any endangered natural resource. When we get to the bottom of all this maybe that will become clear.

Being Part of It

There are important things that are really hard to put into words.

Tracy and I were playmates in kindergarten and first grade. After second grade my family moved away from Ka'u. Eventually, when I was in my twenties we moved back and started a ranch. Tracy also helps run her family's cattle ranch in Ka'u. We share fencelines and see each other almost daily on the backroads of Ka'u.

There are a lot of differences. I have one small child; she has a large family and a small grandchild. She's being here; I've been away for roughly half my life. She knows this community inside and out in a way that I never will. She knows who dated who in high school, what their parents thought about it, how many children they have and with whom. She knows all the high school kids by name. I barely know that they exist. She has that deep, multi-generational knowledge of the community that I don't have. I don't have a knack for it, and I made different choices with my life - I know what early morning looks like in Paris and Taipei. Now I like to stay here in Ka'u and learn the intricacies of this big country and little community bit by bit, although I'm still not any good at keeping track of all the strands of family history.

I wish I could be somewhere distant and exotic sometimes but I know that you can't have it both ways. There's a story that we are all making together. You're either part of it or not.

But this story, which is the internal story of a real community, and the value of it can't be counted, measured, "monetized." It's the opposite of money. It is more like literature, but it isn't written down, published, made into somebody else's experience. It's in the little things. You can destroy it just by looking at it with greedy eyes, just like any other intimacy. This is the intimacy of people, land, and sea. It is unbearably important and incredibly evasive.

Picking

Yesterday at the farmer's market, my friend who survived the Khmer Rouge period in Cambodia showed me a picture of her sister, who survived imprisonment, torture, and near execution by firing squad. She said, "That's my sister. She only came here once. We had her picking raspberries. My sister said 'worse than Pol Pot.'"

Approach

The thing is that farmers and ranchers are not very happy with modern agriculture and the current world order either. We aren't too happy with having to make a living on razor-thin margins, with having to produce food for 120 of our fellow citizens on average.

The problem is that we know how fragile our agricultural system is. We know how tough it is to provide our families with the trappings of a modern life-style from an agricultural livelihood. We know how few people are willing to live the life. We know that our agricultural system depends on people like us - depends on us getting up at often un-godly hours of the morning to do things that are not as pleasant as drinking coffee and typing on a keyboard. We know the tough choices that we have all had to make to keep on doing what we do. We respect each other.

Living agriculture is a lot like living on a active volcano, as we do here in Ka'u. When you live on an active volcano you know that it could all explode tomorrow. When you live agriculture you stare down the basics of human life every day. You don't think about Armani Exchange or Airbooks very much. You witness and work on the difference between eating and not-eating every day. This is where you come from. It makes a lot of the criticism of the modern food system seem pretty trivial. As in, "So, don't buy the Doritos!"

Counterbalance

This is a great article.

http://www.american.com/archive/2009/july/the-omnivore2019s-delusion-against-the-agri-intellectuals

I love Wendell Berry, Alice Waters, and crew as much as the next person, but we have to temper idealism with the complex and often unpleasant realities of what it takes to have a minute percentage of the population providing the basic life support systems for the entire civilization. Unavoidably, "what it takes" isn't always all bucolic and heart-warming. I do welcome the critical attention being paid to agriculture and the heightened awareness that comes with it, but criticism has to be tempered with a big dose of respect for the system, however imperfect it may seem. If we crash the financial system, we all lose money - big deal. If we crash the agricultural system, it will be really, really bad.