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Things Fall Apart: Complexity, Supply Chains, Infrastructure & Collapse
Dr. David Korowicz, The Oil Drum (presentation at Oil Drum/ASPO Conference at Alcatraz, Italy in June 2009)
This is a presentation by Dr. David Korowicz from Feasta, given at the Oil Drum/ASPO Conference at Alcatraz, Italy in June 2009. It can be downloaded here: Things fall apart: Some thoughts on complexity, supply chains, infrastructure & collapse dynamics, PDF 23 slides, 1.3 MB, text of spoken presentation.
Suppose I were to take your new born infant, and by some magic transport her back through 16,000 years to a cave in what is now Lascaux in south-western France. Let’s swap your baby with a baby born to a Neolithic mother. There is no reason to believe that in time both children would not turn out to be well-adjusted, unremarkable members of their respective communities. Genetically they are the same. What is clearly different is the world in which they would have to make their way.
In the universe as a whole, entropy, or disorder is increasing. Yet life, our civilisation, the things and institutions we create are ordered. We create islands of low entropy out of the tendency to universal disorder.
To see this we can look at the simple example of a Bernard cell. The molecules in the liquid between the hot and cold plate are moving randomly in all directions. Any one part of the liquid is the same as any other part. As we increase the temperature gradient, we arrive at a point where suddenly there appears lots of convection cells. This phase transition corresponds to the emergence of lots of order and structure within the system.
While the cells themselves are low entropy, we see in the graph that the transition corresponds to a big increase in the rate at which heat is dissipated. Heat is the most disordered (high entropy) form of energy. The dissipation is into the environment outside the experiment. In general locally ordered structures enhance the flow of general disorder and so such structures are thermodynamically stable- as long as there is a continuous flow of free energy through the system. If we reduce the flow of free energy that allows us to maintain the gradient below the critical threshold, the order disappears.
Our civilisation expresses these thermodynamic realities. Far-from-equilibrium thermodynamics gives us a way to view the consequences of what reducing the flow of free energy that is required to build and maintain our society might mean in practice…
(4 August 2009)
the land speaks
Jason Godesky, tobyspeople
In “reading” these words, do you say anything? More likely, you read silently—or more accurately, subvocalize. Like microexpressions, reading, like emotion, still inheres to movement of the human body. It cannot take place solely in an incorporeal “mind,” our fantasies of such aside. We can fool ourselves into that notion only because we’ve reduced the motions involved to the most fleeting versions, giving the superficial impression that they barely happen at all.
In fact, throughout most of history (even using “history” here in its narrowest sense, as the chronicle of events that someone wrote about), silent reading seems like the exception. In his Confessions, Saint Augustine wrote of Saint Ambrose, “When he read, his eyes scanned the page and his heart sought out the meaning, but his voice was silent and his tongue was still. Anyone could approach him freely and guests were not commonly announced, so that often, when we came to visit him, we found him reading like this in silence, for he never read aloud.” While this does confirm that at least some people did read silently, it also clearly marks Ambrose off as possessing a special talent for doing so. We have some earlier accounts that seem to refer to silent readers, such as Demosthenes in Aristophanes’ play, The Knights, but they generally reinforce the idea that very few people ever did so.
For Saenger (2000), the innovation of spaces between words has everything to do with the advent of silent reading. In medieval and ancient script, words ran together. Since people would read them aloud, this posed less of a problem. The spaces separating words help distinguish words as individual units if you need to interpret the meaning of each word separately. As a stream of spoken sound, they serve somewhat less purpose. Yet, even into the nineteenth century, the scarcity of books meant that most people still experienced reading from someone reading aloud (Klinkenborg, 2009).
This realization seems to move reading almost into the realm of an involuntary reaction. We have, at least, trained ourselves to react with only subvocalizations, rather than reading aloud, but the sight of the written word carries a synaesthetic magic in it so powerful that we feel compelled to create the sound. Other magic once worked just as powerfully on us.
…Julie Cruikshank, for example, experienced precisely that. She spent several years among Yukon elders in the 1970s. They trusted her with their stories, insisting she write them in English and share them, hoping through her study to preserve their stories for their own grandchildren, whom they expected would no longer speak their native language. One of these elders, Angela Sidney, told her, “Well, I have no money to leave to my grandchildren. My stories are my wealth.” Since reading those words, they have stayed with me. They seem to say something more profound than just an old woman’s admission that she has no monetary inheritance to leave behind. “Spoken stories were the living encyclopedias of our oral ancestors, dynamic and lyrical compendiums of practical knowledge,” David Abram writes (2009). “Hidden in the magic adventures of their characters were precise instructions for the hunting of various animals, and for enacting the appropriate rituals of respect and gratitude if the hunt was successful, as well as specific insights regarding which plants were good to eat and which were poisonous, and how to prepare certain herbs to heal cramps, or sleeplessness, or a fever. The stories carried instructions about how to construct a winter shelter, and what to do during a drought, and—more generally—how to live well in this land without destroying the land’s wild vitality.”
In general, we do not value local knowledge; we honor generalized theorems and hypotheses that we can test and replicate in any environment. The Enlightenment began by dismissing Europe’s accumulated wisdom and oral tradition wholesale as superstition, and it has continued to discount and disrespect local knowledge everywhere to this day. “Because it is specific to the way things happen here, in this high desert—or coastal estuary, or mountain valley—this kind of intimate intelligence loses its meaning when abstracted from its terrain, and from the particular persons and practices that are a part of its terrain.” (Abram, 2009) Yet, no one lives “in general.” We all live our lives in a particular place. The Enlightenment has often espoused a view of humanity’s ennoblement by reason, even to the point of apotheosis, so it seems only natural that would aspire to a god’s eye view of the world. But for those of us who dwell in the world, it seems that only the kind of local knowledge that oral traditions preserve really matters…
(10 July 2009)
Why Corporations, Emerging Powers and Petro-States Are Snapping Up Huge Chunks of Farmland in the Developing World
Scott Thrill, alternet
Stop me if you think you’ve heard this one before:
Investment banks, sovereign wealth funds and other barely regulated financial entities in search of fat paydays go on buying binges structurally adjusted to maximize their earnings reports and employee bonuses, while simultaneously screwing their business associates and everyone else in the process. It’s all done in near-total secrecy, and by the time everyone finds out about it, they’re already in the poorhouse.
That’s more or less the playbook for the derivatives and credit-default swaps gold rush that ruined the global economy, which cratered in 2007 and has yet to recuperate.
The bubble money has now moved on from housing and turned to the commodities markets, especially global food production. Given what that money did to the housing market, things don’t look good for local communities whose land is being bought up by governments, sovereign wealth and hedge funds, and other investors on the hunt for real value in a hyperreal economy.
Entrenched and developing economic powers — the U.K., China, South Korea, India and more — have launched land rushes to outsource production of everything from staples like rice, wheat, corn and sugar to finance bubbles like biofuels. That includes oil-wealthy Gulf States, which recently feasted on commodities speculation that exploded oil prices in 2008.
The hard numbers are alarming: According to the Guardian, in the last six months over 20 million hectares (around 50 million acres) of arable land, mostly in Africa and Southeast Asia, have been sold or negotiated for sale or lease. That’s about half the size of all arable land in Europe, or the size of entire U.S. states North Dakota or Oklahoma.
…But don’t call it a land grab, cautioned Rodney Cooke, technical advisory division director of the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), who, along with the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), also declined to comment on this article, commissioned a study from the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED) to analyze the disturbing trend. “I would avoid the blanket term ‘land-grabbing,’ ” Cooke said. “Done the right way, these deals can bring benefits for all parties and be a tool for development.”…
The aptly titled report, ” ‘Land Grabbing’ by Foreign Investors in Developing Countries,” from the International Food Policy Research Institute, which declined to be interviewed for this article, explains that “details about the status of the deals, the size of land purchased or leased, and the amount invested are often still murky.”
(11 August 2009)
Related: http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/nature/wish-you-werent-here-the….
The link to the report mentioned in the alternet article is here. Call me naive, but to me the point isn’t whether these deals can be sustainably managed in partnership with the local people. The point is that the local people need to be managing their land sustainably for themselves. -KS
