Performance & power

As a caveat, I should say that I'm only a third of the way through Nature: An Economic History, (by the quote earlier, you can see that it's not a book that you just zip through), but I'm thinking quite a bit about the concept of power that is one of the central themes of the book. Nature selects for performance. Performance is measured by power. Power, for Vermeij, is energy, advantage, the ability to capitalize on opportunity. It's the core of what we mean to express by money. Performance is not about dominance but persistence.
It's a very stark but very clear way of looking at the world. And yet it makes more sense than our current valuation system, which is tilted way over towards the valuation of excess, not the means of persistence. Such as childcare and families. Or the health of the ecosystems that would allow us to persist. Or knowledge of the real world and the ability to create practical plans for our peristence.
An economy built around performance, rather than greed and fear, would bring us closer to persisting.

Currently Reading

Nature: An Economic History
Geerat J. Vermeij

it rocks
It might be an idea slightly ahead of its time - I say this because to my surprise my biologist friend bristled slightly at the mere thought of the conjunction of nature and economics.
But what is real sustainability but bringing the two together?

Here's a little sample just totally at random:

In other words, actions and codes that look as if they are designed for the common good emerge because they confer on their bearers or creators not only long-term advantages, but the kind of short-term advantages which natural selection can enhance. The long-term benefits cannot be selected for directly; natural selection is very much about advantages here and now, not in the distant future. Traits conferring long-term advantages emerge because they also work well in the lives of individuals and produce positive feedbacks that enhance the economic well-being for a large number of other participants in the economy. By creating a shared common interest, selfish benefits become traits for the common good.

One could chew on that little bit for quite a while...

"Food" two ways

I had dinner with my parents the other night. When I walked in the door, my dad said, "I was going to make pork with squash." That's his code for: "Michelle, why don't you make dinner with the above-named ingredients and try not to mess it up." The pork was leftover huli-huli pig(spit-roasted whole over kiawe with garlic, ginger, and lemongrass). The squash was that long green Asian squash that I don't even know the name for. My father and brother raise pigs, and grow the squash at the edge of the pig-pens where they are irrigated and fertilized by the piggery run-off. So I cooked some rice, peeled and chopped the squash, sauteed garlic, ginger and onions, threw in the the squash for a bit before the pork, covered, cooked, stirring a couple of times for, say, 20 minutes. Totally easy, nutritious, tasty, soul-satisfying, and it all cost less than $3 in bought ingredients (rice, onions, garlic).
The next day I was in Honolulu with a little extra time to spare, so I went to Whole Foods for some market research. Whole Foods is the ne plus ultra of value-added retail venues in Hawai'i, so I like to just look around and see what they're onto. I saw my friend Lorie Obra's Ka'u coffee "Rusty's Hawaiian" prominently displayed so that was worth the trip in itself. I also noticed that WF was carrying tiny goat loin-chops. I wanted to get some gifts for the friends that were putting me up for the night. I got a bottle of wine, artisan olive bread, two bars of super-premium chocolate (one spiked with chilies, the other with bacon(!)), and marinated olives. That cost me $75. The person in front of me spent $250. The place was a-buzz with beautiful people, there was excellent music on the sound system, and gorgeous prepared food everywhere you looked.

You could hardly have two more extreme experiences of food. Both were enjoyable, although so different. The big difference, to me, is that in our dinner at home the food just came right up out of our lives as a family, the work that we do, and the place where we live, mostly unpackaged and raw. In the other case, the food was also part of a lifestyle, but it was lifestyle as an assemblage of products for the purchasing. Of course there are all kinds of other ways of experiencing food, but the contrast struck me as near the two ends of the spectrum.

agriculture as art

Really it's the first art. We've come to see agriculture in terms of production, simply because that's being the way of our civilization for the past few hundred years - to make everything more and more efficient, more and more standardized, more and more scientific, more and more technological. But agriculture was the first and most daring art, the art of taking up the materials of nature and making something out of it. Making gardens out of wild earth. Taming the beasts of the plains. And yes, turning the natural fecundity of living things to our purposes. Ranching is large-scale landscape art, among other things. And being part of the constant conversation between the soil, the grasses, the sky, the weeds, the animals, the very stones in the fields, and the people. It's just not an art that you can fit into a box and mount on your wall. It's not consumer art. It's much bigger than that.