Seeing Like A State



As centuries passed, and the human herd swelled, the strains on society increased, often sparking friction.  In an effort to discourage chaos, many societies became more structured — codes of rules, conflict resolution systems, hierarchies of control and coercion.  Tribes formed alliances with others, and these confederations often merged into states.  In a shark pool of ongoing growth and overshoot, weak states were vulnerable sitting ducks.  The struggle for survival was a never-ending challenge.  It encouraged better defenses, stronger offences, technological innovation, and tough leaders.

To nourish their strength, states had to focus on maximizing tax revenues, conscripting fresh cannon fodder, and promptly smashing uprisings.  To do this effectively, they needed detailed censuses listing the names and residences of all citizens.  They needed maps that illustrated the boundaries and fields of landed property, the names of the owners, and the economic output generated on each estate.  They needed accurate street maps of cities.  The better a state understood the society it controlled and exploited, the richer and more powerful it could become.

James Scott is a political science professor at Yale.  In his book, Seeing Like A State, he presents a tragi-comical exposé of bloopers and blunders performed by a variety of ambitious states in their quest for greater efficiency, order, and prestige — modernization.

Chapter one takes readers on an illuminating visit to eighteenth century Germany.  Prior to the coal age, wood was the essential source of energy and building materials — no wood, no civilization.  Today, it’s impossible for anyone to know the actual amount of oil that remains underground, but in the forests of old Germany, the reserves of standing trees were perfectly visible to everyone, and they were getting smaller.  Yikes!  Folks having more than a few brain cells realized that if they wiped out the forests, they would wipe themselves out.

Unlike modern society, which is fatally addicted to nonrenewable energy, old Germany had better options, in theory.  Forests were renewable, in theory.  Forests were complex self-regulating ecosystems, and their long-term health was seriously harmed by persistent attacks from gangs of vicious ax murderers.  Unfortunately, the bureaucrats of the state didn’t understand this at all.  When they looked at a forest, they saw precious treasure to be taken, and they throbbed with giddy adolescent excitement.

Healthy, happy undisturbed forests included diverse communities of tree people, most of which were not valuable grade-A species, in the minds of greed-heads.  In a sparkling shower of light, a brilliant solution fell out of the sky — scientific forestry!  The treasure could be maximized by growing nothing but grade-A trees!  Simply erase the messy old forest, and replace it with plantations of Norway spruce.  These trees could be planted, evenly spaced, row after row, century after century.  Every year, the volume of wood grown would equal the volume of wood removed, in theory.  By 1900, scientific forestry had been adapted by cutting edge nations around the world.

Whoops!  Well, the first generation of plantation trees was awesome, having been planted in the fabulously fertile soil produced by thousands of years of old growth forests.  The second rotation was less than awesome, and went downhill from there.  Monocultures were always a magnet for pests and diseases.  Spruce trees become chronically depressed slackers when planted in abused and depleted soils.  Unhealthy root systems encouraged blow downs.  This inspired the birth of a new word — Waldsterben (forest death).

In other types of projects, growing states fooled around with strategies similar to scientific forestry.  Scott says that these strategies were the offspring of an accident-prone control freak mindset, which he called the high-modernist ideology.  It proclaimed that the path to utopia was lit by science, technology, and reason.  He takes readers on a breathtaking whitewater raft ride through a number of high-modernist catastrophes, designed by a mob of half-clever smarty-pants.

Vladimir Lenin, a leader in the Russian Revolution, was a devious super-ambitious control freak, determined to create a high-modernist utopia, by any means necessary.  In order to rapidly industrialize the new state, he needed to rapidly industrialize agriculture, to keep the heroic factory workers well fed.  The age of tractors had arrived, and many nations were becoming very excited about industrial agriculture.  In the twentieth century, the Industrial Revolution was having powerful orgasms, and the entire planet was ravaged by a highly contagious epidemic of drug-resistant get-rich-quick fever.

A fatal flaw in the high-modernist ideology was that it intensified civilization’s merciless war on ecological sustainability.  Yes, scientific forestry was foolish, but so was the traditional low-tech forest mining it replaced.  Scientific forestry just accelerated the wreckage.  Yes, industrial agriculture was foolish, but so was the organic low-tech soil mining it replaced.  The modernists could not comprehend the serious irreversible consequences of the well-intended mistakes they were making; they focused their full attention on utopian fantasies.

Joseph Stalin brutally collectivized Russian agriculture.  Millions of peasants were forced to work on huge mechanized farms.  They were like slaves, even more oppressed than during the bad old days of the czars.  Idiot bureaucrats, who knew almost nothing about the farms they managed, established impossible production quotas.  If factory workers didn’t meet their quotas, they were still fed.  The same was not true for farm workers.  They starved.  Folks who complained were deported or executed.  This adventure in high-modernism resulted in at least 20 million deaths.

The new Brazilian capital, Brasília, was a perfect city, in theory.  It was designed by notorious geniuses, and then built on a bulldozed forest.  It was the pinnacle of modernity, reminiscent of Albert Speer’s monumental designs for Hitler’s Berlin.  Comically, the city that dazzled the avant-garde intelligentsia was despised by the thousands of miserable government workers forced to live in it.  Life in Brasília was painfully bleak.  Eventually, they built an unplanned city around the edges of perfect hell, where they could roll their socks down and enjoy life.

Like a cat with nine lives, high-modernism refuses to die.  Today’s modernist buzzwords include sustainable agriculture, sustainable forestry, sustainable cities, sustainable development, and so on.  The ideology has thoroughly infected the cultures of the civilized world.  It’s taught in every school, so the kiddies are prepared for a soul-killing life of sustainable consuming.  In every facet of our lives, every minute of the day, the air is constantly buzzing with modernist memes.  They define the specifications for how normal, well-adjusted, planet-thrashing consumers think and behave.  Questioning is unacceptable.  Don’t!

Scott’s book is loaded with descriptions of quirky high-modernist escapades.  It’s powerful medicine for folks who are beginning to experience doubts about the sanity of our age of astonishing wonders.  No, you’re not crazy; you’re coming out of the trance.  Good job!  Welcome to reality!

A free PDF of the book can be downloaded HERE.  YouTube has an interesting 38-minute video of Scott HERE.

Scott, James C., Seeing Like A State — How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed, Yale University Press, New Haven, 1998.

One-Straw Revolutionary

Long, long ago, hip folks in the Beatles era were jabbering about Masanobu Fukuoka’s book, The One-Straw Revolution.  It explained how he grew healthy food via natural farming, a low budget, low impact approach.  On his farm in Japan, Fukuoka was growing grain, fruit, and vegetables without plowing, cultivating, chemicals, compost, fertilizer, fossil energy, erosion, pruning, or regular weeding.  He farmed like this for more than 25 years, and his yields were comparable to those at conventional farms.

The Japanese edition of his book was published in 1975, at a time when oil shocks had spurred interest in energy efficiency.  When the English version was published in 1978, it was an international smash hit, and Fukuoka became a celebrity.  Larry Korn was the book’s translator.  He’s a California lad who worked on Fukuoka’s farm for more than two years.  Now, in 2015, Korn has published One-Straw Revolutionary, which is the subject of this review.  It describes Fukuoka the man, and his philosophy, with glowing praise.

Korn detests conventional industrial farming, because it has so many drawbacks.  A bit less troublesome is organic farming done on an industrial scale.  At the positive end of the spectrum, he sees Fukuoka’s natural farming as very close to the ideal, both environmentally and philosophically.  A bit less wonderful than natural farming are permaculture and old-fashioned small-scale organic farming.

The ideal is something like the California Indians that were fondly described in M. Kat Anderson’s book, Tending the Wild.  They were wild hunter-gatherers who included wild plant seeds in their diet.  They devoted special care to the wild plant species that were important to their way of life.  Most folks would consider this to be mindful foraging — tending, not farming.

These Indians did not till the soil, and were not warlike.  Nobody owned the land.  There were no masters or servants.  There was no market system or tax collectors.  They had a time-proven method for living, and this knowledge was carefully passed from generation to generation.  The Indians were wild, free, and living sustainably — in the original meaning of the word.  When the Spanish invaders arrived, they saw these Indians as lazy, because they worked so little.

Fukuoka, on the other hand, resided in a densely populated industrial civilization, which was eagerly adapting American style industrial agriculture.  While the Indians foraged in a healthy wild ecosystem, Fukuoka worked on an ecosystem that had been heavily altered by centuries of agriculture.  He raised domesticated plants and animals.  Fukuoka was experimenting with radically unconventional methods, and had no traditions or mentors to guide him.

He practiced natural farming on one acre (0.4 ha) of grain field, and ten acres (4 ha) devoted to a mix of fruit trees and vegetables.  When Korn arrived in 1974, Fukuoka was assisted by five apprentices, who were not at all lazy, and rarely had a day off.  Cash had to be generated to purchase necessities and pay taxes, so surplus food had to be produced.  Food shipped off to cities carried away phosphorus, potassium, and other minerals that never returned to the farm’s soil.  Thus, his natural farming was quite different from California tending.

On the plus side, Fukuoka’s experiment benefitted from rich soil and generous rainfall — especially during the growing season.  Vegetables could be grown year round in the mild climate, and two crops of grain could be harvested each year.  On the down side, few succeeded in duplicating his success, even in Japan.  It took years to get the operation working, requiring extra servings of intuition and good luck.  Korn warned, “In most parts of North America and the world the specific method Mr. Fukuoka uses would be impractical.” 

In the natural farming mindset, the strategy should not be guided by intellect; nature should run the show.  Fukuoka talked to plants, asking them for guidance.  When he planted the orchard, he added a mixture of 100 types of seeds to wet clay, made seed balls, and tossed the balls on the land.  Seeds included grains, vegetables, flowers, clover, shrubs, and trees.  Nature decided what thrived and what didn’t.  Within a few years, a jungle of dense growth sorted itself out.  But sometimes nature gave him a dope slap.  In the early days, Fukuoka allowed nature to manage an existing orchard, and he was horrified to watch 400 trees die from insects and disease.

My work focuses on ecological sustainability, at a time when the original meaning of sustainability has largely been abandoned, and replaced by sparkly marketing hype.  I go on full alert when I see “sustainable agriculture.”  In my book, What is Sustainable, I took a look at what Korn calls “indigenous agriculture,” which is often imagined to be sustainable.

California tending was far different from the intensive corn farming on the other side of the Rockies, which led to soil depletion, erosion, population growth, health problems, warfare, and temporary civilizations like Cahokia.  In his book Indians of North America, Harold E. Driver estimated that less than half of North America was inhabited by farmers, but 90 to 95 percent of Native Americans ate crop foods, indicating that farm country was densely populated.  In corn country, defensive palisades surrounded many villages.

In 2015, humankind is temporarily in extreme overshoot, as the cheap energy bubble glides toward its sunset years, and the climate change storms are moving in.  Obviously, feeding seven billion sustainably is impossible.  At the same time, highly unsustainable industrial farming cannot continue feeding billions indefinitely.  It’s essential that young folks have a good understanding of ecological sustainability, and our education system is doing a terrible job of informing them.

The California Indians provide an important example of a vital truth.  When voluntary self-restraint was used to keep population below carrying capacity, people could live sustainably in a wild ecosystem via nothing more complex than hunting and foraging.  They had no need for farming, with its many headaches, backaches, and heartaches.

Korn’s book got exciting near the end.  Farming was just one facet of Fukuoka’s dream.  As a young man, he attended an agriculture college, and then endured a dreary job as a plant inspector.  His mind overloaded, his health fell apart, and he nearly died.  In 1937, he had a beautiful vision, quit his job, and went back home to the farm. 

In his vision, he suddenly realized that all life was one, and sacred.  Nature was whole, healthy, and perfect — and nothing our ambitious intellects imagined could improve this harmonious unity in any way.  Humans do not exist in a realm outside of nature, no matter what our teachers tell us.  Heaven is where your feet are standing.

The world of 1937 was a filthy, crazy, overpopulated train wreck, and this was largely thanks to science, dogmas, and philosophies.  Intellect alienated us from our “big life” home.  Civilization had created a dysfunctional world that was far too complex.  The lives of most people were no longer intimately connected to the natural world.

In agriculture, the herd of experts insisted that plowing, pruning, cultivating, chemicals, and weeding were mandatory for success.  One after another, Fukuoka abandoned these required tasks, made some needed adjustments, and didn’t crash.  His farm got simpler and healthier.

No other animals harm themselves by pursuing science.  Fukuoka realized that people should be like birds.  “Birds don’t run around carefully preparing fields, planting seeds, and harvesting food.  They don’t create anything… they just receive what is there for them with a humble and grateful heart.”  Bingo!

How can we reorient to nature?  “For most of us, that process begins by unlearning most of the things we were taught when we were young.”  The healing process requires abandoning many, many beliefs and behaviors that our culture encourages.  We need to waste less, spend less, and earn less, take only what we need, and nothing more.  “Wearing simple clothing, eating simple food, and living a humble, ordinary life elevates the human spirit by bringing us closer to the source of life.”

Korn, Larry, One-Straw Revolutionary, Chelsea Green, White River Junction, Vermont, 2015.

Meat — A Benign Extravagance

Is meat evil?  A vocal minority shouts “Yes!”  The British eco-journalist, George Monbiot, was an enthusiastic advocate for the vegan diet.  He did an abrupt U-turn after reading Simon Fairlie’s book, Meat — A Benign Extravagance.  Fairlie is a powerhouse thinker, a fire hose of ideas, and a tireless detective who hunts down those who ejaculate statistics that are ridiculously biased or fictitious.  This book will reduce your trust in all statistics by 71.8 percent.  He doesn’t take sides; he forces everyone to reconsider their beliefs.  I strongly recommend it to readers who have an addiction to food.

Fairlie is an ex-vegetarian, a hippie eco-journalist, and a jack-of-all-trades.  Once upon a time, he was living on a vegetarian commune in England, and contemplating their diet.  He suddenly realized that it made no sense.  The protein and oils that they consumed were imported from faraway lands where people were poor and hungry, whose cropland was being diverted from essential subsistence farming to produce commodities for export — nuts, soy, pulses, peanut butter, and vegetable oils.  Why didn’t his commune consume the protein and oils produced by their next-door neighbors — meat, eggs, and dairy foods?

One of his primary interests is livestock production.  His (impossible) sacred mission in life is to envision a sustainable way of feeding 60 million Brits.  He doesn’t gift wrap a perfect solution, but the process of his search is delightfully illuminating.  Three ideas provide the foundation of this book.  (1) Feeding grain to livestock (or automobiles) is not ethical.  (2) Humankind consumes too much food from animal sources, and people in the prosperity bubble should cut back.  (3) A diet that includes mindfully produced animal products can be ethical.

The book contains an enormous number of words and ideas, and it did not have space for some important issues.  Fairlie sincerely believes that caring and competent livestock husbandry does not involve cruelty.  Allowing animals to suffer from the painful maladies of old age is cruel.  In the good old days, merciful wild predators ethically put elderly critters out of their misery.

He acknowledges the arrival of peak cheap energy, but doesn’t vigorously explore the enormous consequences for agriculture and society.  Feeding 60 million Brits via muscle-powered agriculture is not possible, and it’s impossible to indefinitely continue mechanized farming using biofuels.

He proposes a radical redesign of the British way of life, whilst not addressing the Mother of All Problems — the extreme overpopulation of the UK, and its dependence on importing large amounts of food.  (Or is agriculture itself the Mother Problem?)  Obviously, it would be far easier to feed one million (or fewer) Brits in a sustainable way.  He sensibly omits a discussion of diet and health, in which a million experts can agree on nothing. 

If a fleet of predator drones destroyed every facility for the mass production of animal foods tonight, half of the world’s livestock and poultry would remain unharmed.  Ruminants (cattle, sheep, goats) can convert plant fiber that we cannot digest into meat and milk that we can digest.  Normally, they dine on lands that are unsuitable for raising crops.  Hogs are omnivores that, in traditional societies, excelled at converting garbage into bacon.  They cleaned up feces, kitchen trimmings, spoiled foods, butcher’s wastes, and many other delicacies, converted them into wealth, and stored it up — like a piggy bank.  Chickens played a similar role.

So, if the consumption of animal foods were limited to animals raised in these traditional ways, it would cause far less harm.  Never forget that the production of grains and vegetables is also a source of immense harm.  Plowing and reaping a grain field destroys many animals in a cruel and unethical manner, and it gradually ruins the soil, too.

Fairlie devoted considerable effort to exposing the sources of ridiculous statistics cited by the anti-meat crowd.  For example, “each kilogram of beef requires the consumption of 100,000 liters of water.”  This was traced to David Pimentel, a respected scientist.  His calculation included rain that fell on the grassland — rain that would fall whether or not livestock were present.  Fairlie’s grass-fed cattle consume about 50 liters of water per day, and soon piss most of it right back out.  At the very most, his grass-fed beef required 400 liters per kilogram of meat.  Oddly, Pimentel’s calculations implied that less water was needed to produce grain-fed beef.

Fairlie also butted heads with those who blame climate change on livestock, the alleged source of 18 percent of all greenhouse gas emissions.  Cattle are worse than cars!  He plunged into a long and comical hunt for the source, which turned out to be the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO).  The statistic was blessed by the reputable International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), went viral, and was repeated by major media outlets, with no fact checking whatsoever — an instant imaginary catastrophe. 

Transportation probably produces about 52 percent of greenhouse gases.  Ruminants probably produce from 5 to 9.6 percent of emissions.  If all cattle were exterminated tonight, they would soon be replaced by wild ruminants, which also fart and belch.  The Great Plains of the US were formerly home to 60 million bison (not a problem), but they have been replaced by 60 million climate killing cattle (oh my God!). 

The ecologically worst foods come from exterminated rainforests.  We must avoid rainforest products like soy, beef, and palm oil.  Was your tofu, vegetable oil, or soy burger born in a former jungle?  Seventy percent of vegetable oil comes from soy.  Soybeans are processed into vegetable oil and high-protein soy meal.  About three percent of the meal is eaten by humans.  Most of the meal becomes high-potency feed for the industrial meat-production facilities that we all love to hate.

What would the UK look like if it became 100% vegan?  There would be no livestock, and no manure, so soil fertility would have to be maintained by devoting a third of the cropland to growing green manures, instead of food.  If the land were to be worked with biofuel powered machines, then more land would be needed to grow the fuel.  Maintaining and replacing the machines would require the existence of an industrial society, which is not sustainable.  If horses were used for traction, producing their feed would require between a quarter and a third of the farm (for oats, grass, and hay).

On the bright side, land formerly used for grazing could be returned to woodland and wildlife.  On the downside, expanded woodland would provide habitat for expanded numbers of wild animals, which vegan communities could not ethically kill.  Bunnies, boars, and deer frequently confuse large thriving gardens with a delicious paradise, and they routinely disregard stern instructions from agitated gardeners.

No farmer, meat-eater or vegan, can tolerate the presence of uncontrolled wildlife.  One solution is defoliation — surround the community with a wide vegetation-free buffer.  Animal rights advocate, Peter Singer, recommended capturing and sterilizing the wildlife.  The other option is an impermeable fence, tall enough to block deer, and deep enough to block burrowers.  Do you enclose the garden, or do you enclose nature?  What about mice, rats, and pigeons? 

These are just a few of the notions served at Fairlie’s banquet of ideas.  After observing the world through the mind of a livestock husbandman, I was impressed by how much effort, complexity, suffering, and damage was required to keep way too many people alive. 

The original indigenous inhabitants of the land simply adapted to living with the ecosystem that surrounded them.  They ate salmon, bison, and aurochs that thrived without human owners and managers.  Their way of life had no objections whatsoever to the existence of lions, wolves, and bears.  They had little need to molest the living forest.  They never had to think about soil depletion, erosion, or pollution.  They enjoyed a far healthier diet.  They could drink out of any lake or stream.  They lived well, without rocking the boat, for quite a while. 

Fairlie, Simon, Meat — A Benign Extravagance, Chelsea Green, White River Junction, Vermont, 2010.

The Omnivores Dilemma

America doesn’t enjoy a healthy, traditional, time-proven national cuisine.  We are bombarded by a phenomenal variety of food options, and this makes us dizzy and highly susceptible to food fads.  Our venerable nutrition experts point us in every imaginable direction, and some dietary factions have evolved into militant food jihads.  Michael Pollan was fascinated by this chaotic realm of greed, deceit, ignorance, confusion, fantasy, and flame-throwing righteousness.  He wrote The Omnivore’s Dilemma in a heroic effort to provide us with something resembling an objective, unbiased investigative journalist’s overview of the American food system.

The first of Pollan’s three lessons discusses the world of industrial corn.  Cheap, subsidized, processed corn has become our number one source of nutrients.  Americans have become “corn chips with legs.”  Forty years ago, my Uncle Blaine’s dairy cows enjoyed a diet of delicious North Dakota grass.  I was saddened to realize that today’s milk, butter, and cheese are primarily made of corn, not grass.  A corn-fed cow consumes the equivalent of 35 gallons of fossil fuel.  Beef, pork, chicken, and eggs are also largely corn-based.  Pollan describes the mass production of corn-fed meat at Confined Animal Feeding Operations — profitable enterprises that are disgustingly cruel and filthy.

Pollan’s discussion of nitrogen fertilizer blew my mind — it’s a primary contributor to humankind’s population explosion.  Without synthetic fertilizer, it would not be possible for the human herd to exceed four billion.  Prior to 1945, we ate crops produced by solar-powered plants.  Now, a tsunami of synthetic fertilizers is using corn plants to convert fossil fuels into food.  To produce one calorie of industrial corn requires using more than one calorie of fossil fuel.

The second lesson examines the farm world beyond industrial corn.  We are introduced to the remarkably clever Joel Salatin, who excels at producing impressive quantities of grass-fed meat without cruelty, crowding, pollution, or land degradation.  His meat is superior to industrial organic meats.  Thanks to big money, organic standards have been seriously weakened.  It’s OK to raise organic beef on filthy feedlots.  Organic chickens can be raised in metal sheds where 20,000 birds are jam-packed together — and the “free range” label is essentially meaningless marketing gibberish.

Organic agriculture used to be the realm of groovy small-scale hippy enterprises, but they have been pushed aside by the rise of industrial-scale organic farming, which uses no less fossil energy than conventional farming.  Industrial organic produces large quantities of food at a lower cost than hippy farmers, and it is designed to smoothly integrate with the corporate food retailing industry.  Whole Foods isn’t interested in buying ten boxes of carrots from Henry the Hippy.

The third lesson discusses the hunter-gatherer way of eating.  Pollan foraged for greens, mushrooms, and fruit.  He learned how to use a gun, and he shot a wild pig.  He created a meal for which he had provided most of the ingredients himself.  He was fully conscious of where the food came from, and how it was prepared — a very different experience from the standard American mealtime.

This section included a thoughtful discussion of the ethics of meat-eating.  Pollan carefully explored the realm of animal rights philosophy.  I was surprised (and delighted) to learn that many animal rights thinkers have contempt for domesticated species, because they exist only to be used by their human owners.  I was also surprised (and stunned) to learn that some animal rights folks see wild predators, like lions and tigers, as being wrong or evil because they are hurtful to others.

The one notable shortcoming of the book is that it did not include a robust discussion of sustainability.  Sustainable agriculture is a rarity.  Never forget that it was low-impact, muscle-powered, 100% organic farming that destroyed the agricultural systems of countless extinct civilizations.  Any petroleum-based process is unsustainable.  But even if organic farming was done with just muscle power, most of it would still be unsustainable.  Much modern farming depends on irrigation, and irrigated agriculture commonly self-destructs.  Pollan mentions that Iowa has lost half of its topsoil in 150 years, but he fails to warn us that raising annual crops in tilled fields is almost always unsustainable, because it destroys the soil.  There are many ways to produce wholesome food without irrigation, tilling, petroleum, or animal enslavement — and they should be at the center of our attention today.

Pollan is a skilled writer and a sharp thinker, and he has written a stimulating, informative, and easy-to-read book.  I would strongly recommend it to animals who eat food.

Michael Pollan, The Omnivores Dilemma, Penguin Press, New York, 2006.