the thing about crushes

This is a bit different from my usual fare, but I felt inspired to share.

Thats the thing about crushes:
they end.  All of them.
Amazement has a shelf-life.
So, any relationship built on a single,
solitary fascination will eventually lose its charm.
It isn’t the same wonder
of the child that holds the astronomer’s gaze
in fascination as an adult on those same stars,
its an ever-churning renewal of wonder
in discovery of the new.

If you were to lacquer the sky
in an effort to know it, by the time you finished
the beginning would be old
to your knowing,
your tentative understanding outdated
as the sky turned, old stars
dying and whole new clusters being born.

I think a good partner is like those stars.
A good partner as they walk through life
is constantly becoming someone new,
a fascinating elaboration
on the previous version of themselves.

The art of partnership is like jazz:
a shared rhythm and key, but then
independent improvisations
balanced on the same themes, complimentary
without getting in each others’ way.
Constantly re-coat your partner’s playing
with your understanding, hold the gift
of their inspiration and let it enrich yours.
Accept the inevitable dissonance
but listen for how to resolve.
Set boundaries to the space they take,
but let their playing go where it may,
provided they let you do the same.

Love is that: jazz.
Playing attentively, lacquering the world with sound,
fascination renewed by revivified harmony.

An Ethic of Misfitness

I think of myself as a misfit.  Misfitness is not about strangeness, or unsuitability.  It is not an absolute, but is a relative label. Given the right conditions–a community that doesn’t hold your values, doesn’t speak your language–any of us can be a misfit. Misfitness is an amalgam of choice and circumstance: most of us at some time or another have felt like one. Most of us do not choose to be misfits.
Misfitness is also contingent upon our own ability (or willingness) to feel included and to have some sense of ownership and belonging to that community. In that sense, misfitness is dependent upon context, but also upon an internal state of mind. Once we reach adulthood, none of us are passively misfits. We could choose to conform or to adopt the habits of lifestyle and thought that cause less friction with those around us. Many people do not agree with all of the dominant values to the culture in which they live, or find themselves marooned in a community that do not feel wholly at home with, but because the risks and consequences to stepping outside of its norms are so high, they choose not to leave or to depart from custom. For many it doesn’t feel like much of a choice. Being a misfit means owning that choice and choosing not to abide by all of the norms of your community.
Misfits are valuable; as with Mandela’s presence in South Africa, Gandi’s path in India, Martin Luther King’s or Foucault’s wisdom about America, we as a society are richer for having misfits who do not see us as we see ourselves. Their willingness to provide us with the opportunity to understand ourselves differently is powerful. Since it is contained within a single person, that gift is fragile.
I choose to be a misfit. My need is not to be different, but to be honest to the world as I see it. I choose that honesty because I care for the people within these communities.  Being a misfit to a community grants me a unique perspective on the choices they make and the values they hold. It allows me to express the tensions, conflicts, and harmonies not always visible from the dominant perspective. Inshalla, this different perspective can help a community to see itself more clearly, and shape itself more beautifully. As a good deconstructionist, I make no claims to truth or correctness. The power of my observations and ideas will speak for themselves.

The Easter Island Problem

Subtitle: Are we Americans Actually Capable of an Ecological Revolution?

Before they began to die of starvation, before their ritualized society collapsed, before they chopped down the last remaining tree on the island, before their public monument projects began to stretch thin the society’s ability to supply basic needs, Easter Islanders must have realized: how we’re living our lives isn’t going to cut it in the long run. If they could see the crisis coming, why didn’t they do anything to avert it? If we could conjure their voices to tell their story, what would they have to say to themselves?

Would their narrative sound a little like ours now?

The Easter Island Problem is not a new problem, as Jared Diamond points out in his book Collapse: How Societies Choose to Succeed or Fail. Many times in human history a society has seen the writing on the wall, and yet been unable or unwilling to change its ways in time to avert disaster. Professor Diamond has said recently to the audience of National Public Radio that it is unlikely the first world lifestyle as we know it will exist anywhere in the world in a generation. Frightening as this assertion might be, it is supported by the most comprehensive report ever done on the relationship between how we live our lives and the ecosystems that support it: the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment. Through that looking glass, we are able to have a certain amount of foresight. The writing on the wall we can see is probably much the same as the Islanders must have seen in written in their rapidly-deforested landscape: our long term success as a society depends upon fundamentally changing our relationship with the natural world. We need to undergo an ecological revolution.

Carolyn Merchant, the author of Ecological Revolutions: Nature Gender and Science in New England offers one simple, elegant model for understanding when a society could undergo an ecological revolution and why. Merchant saw the relationships between a society and the environment that it inhabits as three overlapping spheres of human life: reproduction, production and consciousness. Ecological transformations occur when tension between the requirements of society and the natural requirements of an ecosystem reach a critical threshold. Given the dynamism of the relationships between society and the environment, once that point is reached dramatic changes will happen on both sides of the equation. That dynamic transformation is an ecological revolution.

Given that an ecological revolution for Americans will occur either way, the key question is what kind of transformation we have in store for us. Ecological revolutions can be lumped into two broad categories, as adaptive or reactive. An adaptive revolution is one where the critical pressure between ecology and society generates transformations in reproduction, consciousness, and production that allows the society to evolve to a new stable equilibrium with the ecology that supports it. These changes that transform the society would also slow down the ecological processes that were driving the society towards collapse. A reactive revolution, well, that’s essentially all the other possibilities.

An ecological revolution you say? We Americans are a curious lot. Our society is on the one hand, a porous, pluralistic creature. We pride ourselves on being pragmatic and adaptive. We are quite willing to pick new ideas up and see if they fit us. At the same time, we are stubborn and stogy, championing the values that shaped our nationhood and have changed little in two hundred plus years. We pride ourselves in being able to impose our will on the world, holding manifest destiny and bending the land to our will as core rights as Americans. While we easily pick an idea up, it takes a Civil War or a Great Depression or a Martin Luther King to convince us to put an idea down. The key question that the Easter Island Problem poses to us is this: are we willing to question our key values? And, are we willing to put down the values that are not actually in our best interests? What could possibly propel an adaptive ecological revolution for us Americans?

Not reproductive pressures, it would seem. Currently, the number of Americans grows slightly each year, as our declining birth rate is balanced by immigration. While it does not seem likely in the foreseeable political future, it is possible the floodgates of immigration would open, allowing millions of would-be Americans into the country. What might be driving this where it to occur? If it were not from internal shifts in society that would amount to shifts in production or consciousness, would it be external shifts such as famine in other places? If that were the case, it would seem unlikely in such a “climbing on to the lifeboat” scenario that we could muster anything but a reactive response. And if the opposite were true and there was a severe decline in the number of Americans? Again, the conditions likely to have produced such a human cataclysm could most likely be described as an internal collapse, or a reactive ecological revolution in America that has already begun to play itself out.

What then can be said for the great engine of American ingenuity, our mechanisms of production? We like to think of the American marketplace as the model of the ideal market, where producers and consumers tango, using simple self interest to empower the invisible hand to guide all to the public good in a great collaborative dance. If our mechanisms of production are to propel an ecological revolution, they will need to be dynamic, innovative, and adaptive to the constraints our supporting ecosystems place upon us. In a perfect market system, fundamental change in production is possible because there is a dynamic interplay between both parties to the dance: the preferences of consumers and the modes of production.

Unfortunately, our market isn’t exactly perfect. There are always outside consequences to our decisions as producers and consumers that affect others in society. Those externalities are considered one of the key drags on a perfect market system, and can make our elegant tango couple more like a drunken whirlwind. One way to phrase the Easter Island problem is this: are we willing to question the “perfectness” of our market system?

Perhaps the greatest cause of market externalities is that American culture holds consumers blameless for the impact of their consumption decisions on others. If a person buys paper from a paper mill that damaged the Columbia river, we scold the paper mill, not the purchaser of paper.

In the 1970’s Harold Coase wrote a paper that now plays a crucial role in economic theory, and also nicely explains how consumers get off the hook. Coase’s Theorem states that externalities only “exist” because there is a producer and a victim; in our culture’s habit of thought, the consumer is left out of the equation. As a result, Our economic model focuses on how to allocate property rights in order to create the appropriate normative outcomes to these externalities, which addresses the consequences but not the cause of our less-than-perfect decision making.

To draw on an example from ecology, ants and aphids are two co-adapted species. Ants will often “farm” aphids, protecting them from other predators and relocating them to healthy leaves and ensuring they can thrive and reproduce. In turn, aphids produce a sweet “milk” that ants use to feed the queen for cloning more ants. This mutualistic relationship can wreak havoc on a single tree or even an area of a forest, but would we ever ascribe the damage done to the tree solely to the aphids? These two co-adapted species are both responsible, just as producers and consumers are for the externalities to production.

Why do we hold them blameless? The primacy of the consumer and their inalienable right to consume what they please, how they please is one of the most deeply enshrined American values. I’ll leave the why alone for now (I’ll tackle that tough nugget in a separate post); regardless, the result is that consumer decision-making is free of the informational pressure from externalities. In a natural system, the externalities (damage to the tree) of this ant-aphid duo would eventually limit the number of aphids the ecosystem could support, and put a pressure on the ants and aphids to reach a sustainable equilibrium. This informational feedback can be found throughout nature, providing both stability and the ability to adapt to changing conditions. However, our systems of production are a human system that relies on human-constructed feedbacks. If human institutions or regulations or habits do not provide that informational feedback, the information is lost. The Easter Island problem poses this question to us: if it is going to lead to our collapse, are we willing to let go of this central American value that protects the primacy of the consumer?

Since consumers are left unaccountable for the externalities to their consumption choices, the consumption side of our American market dance is “tethered” to its current decision-making paradigm. As long as the characteristics of consumption remain essentially fixed to the current modes of behavior, even if the supply side incorporates the information from externalities effectively the system is incapable of fundamental change. If one partner in the dance isn’t willing to try some new steps, they aren’t going to get very far. This makes this a shift in consciousness that would connect consumers with the consequences of their consumption of critical importance. Without that, our potentially adaptive, innovative market system will remain in deadlock. This change in the American consciousness is then the linchpin that might allow us the possibility of an adaptive ecological revolution, and permit us to escape the Easter Island problem.

A Question for Mr. Ford

The Bill Ford Lecture-The Road to a Sustainable Transport Future

(Walk the line, Bill.)

It started with the necessary party rhetoric, and the obligatory promotional video. The video’s content was unsurprising for the most part, aside from some interesting hydrogen combustion technology which was pegged to the “distant future” board. The most surprising part of the video was actually how conventional and uninspiring (and honest) the prospects are for changing how things are done in the near term. There isn’t much, in short.
Moving past that lump to swallow, Mr. Ford turned to selling the audience on Ford Motor Company ‘s commitment to a sustainable future. I believe Bill when he says he is committed to a sustainable future. Mr. Ford’s key proposition for how to create a sustainable transport future was to create a forum for the relevant stake-holders to formulate the policy ground rules. This would provide some risk-mitigation for the car companies (they would better know which technologies to invest in) and a foundation for real change. It’s not a bad idea.

After a question around accelerating the move to alternative fuels, his response was essentially that there wasn’t much Ford could do except for wait until the right political wind was blowing. This jarred something loose for me. Now, my homeland is California. Los Angeles specifically. While I grew up in Ohio rustbelt, I grew up on stories of how the car industry bought up and dismantled the cable cars and light rail that had composed at its height arguably the most impressive public transportation system in the world. So, as Bill spoke of many of the necessary parts of a sustainable transportation future being out of Ford’s hands, the transport history of LA was ringing in my ears.

This sort of power to shape the world according to its will is not true of the car industry now as it was then. The fact remains that the face of America is etched in the image of the personal transport vehicle. Modern America co-evolved with the car. The co-evolution of American society over the twentieth century with the car produced a built environment of space and sprawl that is dependent upon an automobile transport model. This is not to say that car companies are solely responsible for this aspect of the modern American character. They did enable it, and provide a nice initial shove to get the mountain of American culture moving. Consumer self-interest and social pressures carried it from there.

A move to alternative fuels, cars as a distributed power source, and new types of engines as Mr. Ford proposes is to be lauded. Assume in a generation we have complete adoption of these new technologies; while this would reduce the energy demand and environmental footprint of the use of those vehicles significantly, what this amounts to is building better cars.

However, all of the potential gains from better cars pales in comparison to the gains to be made from simply reducing the amount of transportation necessary. If all our cities were physically structured like New York, we would have a quarter of the transport energy budget that we do now. The structure of our society is inefficient in a transport sense, and those inefficiencies are the inheritance of this car culture.

The car culture has far broader consequences for our culture in terms of the damage it has done to communities and their social and economic health. We have many, many reasons to redress this cost of our transportation choices, not least of which are the consequences to our communities social and economic health.

The most critical issue to a sustainable transport future for American society is not moving to better cars, but moving to a fundamentally different structure of our built environment, and a fundamentally different relationship with transportation as a culture. I’ll call this the New Model for transport.

Given this as a backdrop, part of what will enable the New Model are transport products that could facilitate it. That means public transport. It probably means lots of things that we can’t even imagine at this point. Most importantly, if we actually did succeed in creating this sustainable transport future, it would likely mean a significant reduction in the amount of individual transport needed. It would mean the end of the car society as we know it.

Here is the crux of the problem. Ford could supply us with such technology. If Ford supplied such technology, it would be facilitating a shift in consumer demand that would shrink the transport pie and categorically reduce the demand for its products. Ford as a company has a dis-incentive to do such harm to its bottom line.

At least that is how it would likely be seen. Such an apparent conflict of interests tends to produce myopia. It is actually a fantastic opportunity for Ford to reinvent itself as a New Model company and drive a true shift to a sustainable American society at the same time. When it comes down to it, if Ford does not supply those solutions, some other more innovative and nimble company will. And it may not be an American company that would preserve American jobs and drive a new phase of the American economy.

In his role as skipper, he is dragging an old-line company and an old-line industry stubbornly into a new business model. The car companies are not the behemoth political players they once were, and as a professor of mine put it, “they’re getting it from all sides, buffed by environmental groups, government regulations, labor needs, and most of all the unrestrained forces of the capital markets.” Indeed, it’s a rough life at the moment, and Mr. Ford is sailing some quite stormy seas. Mr. Ford has a tight line to walk if he is to hold up his old-line affiliation and develop new technologies, and tighter still if he is to use the grand-daddy of the automotive industry to commence the beginning of the end of the car culture. I’m not envious of his complicated position, but I’m also not convinced he’s actually on a sustainable tack.

Finally, this is my question Mr. Ford: Ultimately, a sustainable transportation future–and a sustainable society–lies beyond the car society. If you are committed to a sustainable transport future, are you ready to question the car society? Are you willing to question Ford as a car company? If so, what do see as the role of Ford Motor Company on the road to this New Model of a transportation future? Are you ready to truly walk the line?

On Apples and Consumer Ignorance

A meditation on the pick-your-own fruit place in Ypsilani, Michigan.

It was quite interesting to see a place where the ubiquitous apple was exulted to the rank of precious commodity. This, while there are thousands of them lying about. Clearly it wasn’t about the quantity that was giving them such a value in the eyes of the apple pickers and eaters. Was it the quality, then (asks the economist)?

Well, they were good. As one who grew up in apple country, there can be an enormous gulf of gastronomic difference between the flavors to a grocery store apple and that of an apple freshly picked. But there are good apples to be had around here, it being apple country and all. However, the farmer’s market apples are quite good-good enough that I doubt that I could really tell the different if asked to judge. And the farmers market certainly carries a well-cultivated aura of quality. So, I tend to doubt its entirely about the difference in quality that produces this apple-awe.

This makes it all the more curious that the preciousness with which apples are treated here seems greater still than within the farmers-market-temple-to-fresh-produce.

Methinks it is the proximity to the source of the apple. You get a bit of this distilled into the farmers market experience, but it does not carry quite the same-what? It is a sort of reverence–we have a reverence for those gentle earthy places where that which sustains us is created. It is a reminder of all the vast time and territory and toil that goes into making a single sweet little fruit. Its scary. It amazing. It makes us eat our food a little more thoughtfully.

A reminder of the miracle of food is enough to make all of us pause and take our food a bit more seriously. It is exactly what farmers’ markets attempt to cultivate in their marketplace, and exactly what grocery stores attempt to sterilize out of the experience.

Wait, why would a grocery store do that, when food is taken so seriously in a farmers market or pick-it-yourself orchard? Wouldn’t they want to reproduce that? Yes, they would. Reference: whole foods, trader joes, etc. The problem is there is quite a lot about the “miracles” that bring food to those shelves that we wouldn’t want to know. The proximity to the source makes all of us aware of the ambiguous chain that connects us to its production. The purity of apple picking reminds us of all the little sins committed in getting our dinner to those grocery store shelves, carefully packaged, and carefully protecting our ignorance.

Grocery stores are getting good at the fine art of balancing the maintenance of our ignorance with the perception of proximity. We can look at the food on the shelf in the organic isle and be comforted by the feeling that we know where its coming from, without actually having any idea.

Here, have an apple I picked. How do you like ‘dem apples?

A brief note on Lonely Planet Guides

A note on Lonely Planet guides as informed by my recent travels. An eminent thinker in Revolutionary times said once that incomplete information was far worse than no information at all. Never is this more true than while traveling in developing countries. Early Lonely Planets understood this principle and were valued for their honesty around the uncertainty of their information. When they weren’t sure, thought it might change, or didn’t trust their source, they said so. However, as a brilliant-but-currently-employed-as-a-secretary contemporary of mine said, its all about the marketing. Lonely Planet’s target audience has changed. So, therefore, has their research habits. It was originally published for those who were willing to put forth whatever risk and exertion was necessary to experience the “essence” of a place. This was a fairly scarce lot, who generally had cultivated a certain hardiness and toughness. Read: it was for backpackers.

Realizing the romance of what they had put in print now appealed to a broader audience, (albeit one not necessarily as adventuresome and resilient), they retooled their books. Read: their target audience blossomed ambitiously to… everyone. In seeking to make all places on their map accessible to everyone, it meant their researchers to spend a lot more bouncing up and down on mattresses and testing of mid to high range restaurants to find stuff Sue and John from the midwest think they can hack. Now, there’s nothing bad about Sue and John going to Africa or India; opening up travel to distant parts of the world to everyone in principle is a fantastic idea. (Well, i’ll open that can of worms some other time). The problem is in the research. In trying to cover everything about everywhere for everyone, they lost some of their… research rigor. And focus. In working to make sure Sue and John have a decent hotel to stay at, they sold short the beautiful detail of why they were going there in the first place.

Entry-Sikkim

ketchuperi lake-Sikkim

Buddhist Temple-Sikkim

Moral: when you’re writing a guidebook about Sikkim and you highlight the Monastic Trek as one of the to do things, don’t fuck up the distances and trail routes. I’ll spare you the gory details, but this is the cliff notes on this one-of-many foul-ups. Trail distance: 8 kms. Follow the road after the suspension bridge. My personal favorite was “take the fork in the trail to the left.” It was 22kms and there were three suspension bridges, two of which qualified for a game of “good idea, bad idea” before crossing them. Sorry Lonely Planet, calling someone on the phone from the US and getting a verbal description of what the trail is like from a hotelier who has never hiked it and tells you to “take the fork to the left” on a trail that forks over three dozen times does not count as proper research.
And yes, I counted.
This has led me to conclude that the appropriate place in the travelers collection for their used Lonely Planet guides is now in the bathroom.
Their solid and stout.
As such, they make good doorstops.

Some Photos from Sikkim.

lets play good idea, bad idea

looks cozy, eh? -Sikkim

Butterfly-Sikkim

watercolor-Sikkim

Letter to the Dominion Post- Wellington, NZ

Alan Bush
April 14, 2004

 

In Akaroa, on holiday from work in Wellington, I awoke in the morning to something so familiar and yet not at all. For the first time in years I was pulled awake by the calling of birds. To my ears, it was so completely exotic; these were more like the sounds I imagine a young 1970’s science fiction filmmaker conjuring to express the thinking of computers. And the rhythms—astonishing. This vibrant syncopated cacophony made the chirp chirp stuff I was used to sound like amateur work. Even so, for all its bizarre and beautiful uniqueness more what struck me in the moment was similarity and familiarity of this dawn ritual.

 

I grew up on a lush stripe of land at the juncture of Lake Erie and the Grand River in the American Midwest. The river slows and sprawls in to a wetland while the lake traps moisture, creating a belt of effervescent greenness that drew in a string of farming communities and the highest concentration of nurseries in the US. Every morning I’d wake with the dawn and the birdcalls. Those familiar sounds were a part of Mentor’s identity, a symbol of our symbiosis with nature. As the town sprawled and strip-malled its way deeper into the wetland and the nurseries and birdcalls vanished, the splendid location of Mentor died and anytown Middle America took over.

As an expat American from a place that has lost its birdcalls, I am sympathetic to Kiwi efforts at conservation. While the efforts so far have been significant, New Zealand by no means has its environmental nose clean. I say this not to scold but to reinforce. Despite a relatively green-minded populace, Mentor lost its locational identity due to complacency. Don’t think that is not possible here.

What makes this a point worth arguing is that balance of universality and uniqueness in the ongoing transformation of the Kiwi relationship to the environment. There are other large lake wetlands in the Midwest of the US, though their numbers are shrinking. The New Zealand ecology, in both flora and fauna is unique in all the world. It is a gem that Kiwis hold in usufruct for the rest of us and we are richer, not just in spirit but in biological diversity, for knowing it continues to exist. It is this balance of the intrinsic and the instrumental value with our human needs that the dawn chorus is such a powerful symbol of to me.

That the dawn chorus has survived the growing pains of the past hundred years of New Zealand history—even given the diminished habitat range and diversity—is something to be proud of. God knows the past hundred years of development has destroyed many biological treasures throughout the world. Whether the dawn chorus will survive the continual changes of the next hundred years remains to be seen. In large part this will depend upon our mindfulness to the location that grants us identity. While living in a city, even one as green as Wellington, it is easy to forget the sounds of the birds that call the dawn. Whether or not we listen for the dawn chorus, the birds, and the environment that they represent, is most certainly listening for us.

Haiku- Departure

realities rough

edges blend with soft fiction

memory’s mercy

The Lessons of Malawi

Malawi, one of the world’s most welcoming cultures and poorest nations, struggles to provide for itself in the wake of the “green revolution.” The plight of Malawian farmers mirrors that of India’s rain-fed farmers. As India prepares for a second green revolution, it would do well to learn from the failure of intensive agriculture in Malawi.

 

One cannot take a breath in the hot Malawian air without becoming aware of three things: the striking poverty, the deep scars in the land, and the powerful hope and warmth of its people. Their music captures them well: when a stranger arrives in a village they are welcomed in for a meal, and women of the village gather in a circle and sing with honest hope and playful sarcasm, “enshala, now that you have arrived the rains must come!”

A Scarred Biomass Economy

Malawi is one of the poorest nations in the world, being among the ten most impoverished countries according to the UN Human Development Indicators (HDI) index. Most Malawians live on less than 180USD/year, have a life expectancy of less than 40 years, and 40% of the population is described as chronically malnourished. A nation of immigrants, Malawi was the lifeboat from outside conflicts for hundreds of years. This small pacifist nation has become home to more than 16 different ethnic groups. An inland island with no access to the sea and poor transportation corridors, the manufacturing base that you find in South Africa or Namibia never developed. Lacking a manufacturing base providing wage jobs, Malawi never developed cities of any size. As fertility rates rose in Malawi as they did elsewhere in sub-Saharan Africa in last fifty years, the population ballooned from under 4 million in 1960 to 12 million in 2000. Lacking cities and the lure of their employment, Malawi has become the most densely populated rural space in Africa. For more than 85% of the population, subsistence farming is their main or only form of livelihood. Malawi defines the biomass economy, where the lifeblood of the nation depends upon a stable and healthy relationship with the land.

Despite this, even in a year of good rains Malawi has an agricultural shortfall, and has become heavily dependent upon outside aid agencies like DFID and CIDA to provide food security. How does a nation of farmers become unable to feed themselves?

It wasn’t always like this. For much of the early twentieth century, Nyasaland, as it was called before independence, was thought of as a success case to be emulated in southern Africa. It had a flourishing export economy of tea and tobacco, and the subsistence farmers were producing decent yields based on the old system of extensive, shifting cultivation. It seemed like the perfect place for the green revolution to capitalize on the gains that Malawians had made and create a thriving nation of farmers. So what happened?

Much like Home

The answers are at once complex and brutally simple, and lie in the similarities between Malawian subsistence farmers and the rainfed farmers in India. Like Malawi, the soils that underlay much of the drylands area in India are not fantastic. Alluvial soils at best and continental shield at worst, the soil depth and the nutrient base are usually limited. Like India, 95% of Malawi’s rains arrive during the monsoons (November to March), with the average rainfall for most of the rainfed areas between 80-100cm 140cm of rain fall in a good year, but at worst such as during the 2000-2001 drought the average is closer to 40cm. While the flora and fauna that populate India and Malawi are a bit different, the ecosystems that develop within such constraints will share the same characteristics, such as resiliency to drought and nutrient capture. The drylands of India and Malawi are the tortoises of the ecological world, not the hare.

Similarly, the human ecosystems in the rainfed areas of both India and Malawi face the same limited resource endowment and the same kinds of constraint on what agriculture which could be practiced successfully. Without over romanticizing the hardscrabble agrarian lifestyle of Malawians at the turn of the century, their traditional knowledge systems had, like in India, created a human ecosystem which lived more or less in balance with the constraints placed upon it by nature.

A Familiar Foe

Add to this tenuous balance the great sycophantic battle of the twentieth century: keeping up with population growth. In the words of geographer James Reck of Golden West College, “these people had an agricultural system that had been sustainable for centuries before we came along and showed them how not to die. At one point their total fertility rate hit 7.9; the population tripled within almost a generation. No agricultural system can adapt to such growth.” The traditional Malawian system of agriculture, based on extensive, rotational cropping was something that functioned at a population density an order of magnitude less than exists today. With such an increased productive demand on every centimeter of cultivated soil, “they have no choice but to farm intensively.” How could Malawi, and the world, stop the rolling boulder? Enter the Green Revolution.

The Brown Revolution

When Jim Reck lived in Malawi in the late nineteen-sixties, the transition to intensive farming was already underway. “The government started a master farmer scheme. Selected farmers were given some training, equipment, chemicals, etc. The hope was that their increased productivity would catch the eyes of their neighbors, and magically everyone would suddenly be more productive and live happily ever after.” To a degree it was true; the intensive farming model caught on like wildfire and in the years directly after the introduction of intensive farming, yields improved—for a time.

Intensive agriculture as it was practiced in Malawi represented a paradigm shift. Farming was now a cottage industry in the biological manufacture of crops, where seed, plus nutrients, plus water, plus sunlight equaled a bumper crop. Moreover, it demanded these inputs in a precise balance with consistent availability of significant quantities. The problem was that scarcity of nutrients and variability rainfall defined Malawian ecosystems, not quantity and availability. This scarcity and variability meant that while yields increased during the 1970’s, it did so by mining the accumulated wealth within the ecosystem. Since there wasn’t much it didn’t last long.

By the time I arrived in Malawi in 2001, it was clear that intensive agriculture was a failure. At night the skyline was a dull orange, aglow with thousands of field fires as farmers tried to recapture the nutrients from last year’s stalks. During the day, dust storms swirled across exposed fields, taking their stalks and topsoil off to Mozambique. Though the rise and fall of the green revolution occurred in between, the productivity of an acre of farmland is little better today than it was fifty years ago.

Moreover, they cannot revert to their previous method of cultivation because the ecosystem stability it depended upon is now gone. The village elder from Mzimba, a frail old man of 80, put it best: “there is no soil here anymore. There is only dust in which we plant our seeds, and pray to god the trucks might arrive with fertilizer, and the rains might arrive, so we might have another year of miracle.” Malawian farmers are stuck in a sort of liquidity trap: the way your doing things doesn’t cut it, and you’re too poor to switch strategies.

That intensive industrially minded agriculture is a failed principle and not just a failed application of a potentially viable strategy is illustrated by the exceptions that prove the rule. Malawian plateau farmers thought they had it made. They have richer soils, fewer pests, higher rainfall and solid aquifers, and better growing temperatures. As the revolution arrived, their yields were spectacular, drawing specialists from throughout southern Africa to see their achievement. The ambition to reach the land’s full potential pushed the utilization ever higher, clearing forested areas and compacting cultivated plots. At first gradually and later rapidly, slope erosion destroyed the soil quality and the necessary increase in fertilizer and pesticide usage to compensate rendered their groundwater unusable. The removal of buffer species and the loss of surrounding habitat invited up new pests, and yields fell to little better than the surrounding plains.

Malawi illuminates the lesson of the green revolution as this: any system of agriculture that does not play by the local ecological rules is ultimately unsustainable. Whether we are ready to acknowledge it or not, agriculture functions within the confines of an ecosystem. The places with better soils, irrigated lands, and richer farmers may be more resilient to its risks that are introduced by not playing by the rules, but in the long run even there the costs eventually become apparent. We will always be better off to fit our needs within the logic of the existing ecosystem rather than trying to impose a new system, because every time we push too hard on the boundaries the ecosystem will collapse.

Malawi is a canary in the mineshaft. A concentrated experiment in a small nation in switching to a non-ecological farming resulted in collapse. We already have established the necessity of a development strategy for India that can catalyze a thriving biomass economy. What this proves is that any successful development strategy must also be built upon an ecological framework as the foundation of our agriculture.

Sowing the Seeds of Revolution

The next green revolution needs to accomplish two things, and to do them both well: First, it needs to bring ecosystem-based agriculture to the rainfed areas of India. The development of the rainfed areas is heralded as the antidote to India’s calorie crunch. This brings up an important issue. Understandably so, bringing irrigation to the rainfed areas is seen as the primary challenge to increased productivity. While water is important, simply providing greater irrigation is not sufficient to lift the biomass economy sustainably. It is only one piece of the equation, and if it is addressed without considering the implications for the ecosystem it leaves the system vulnerable to collapse. Second, the new green revolution needs to shore up our currently productive farmland and shift it to an ecologically sustainable footing. It is as true in Punjab as it is in the Jan Joaquin Valley in California; without a shift in philosophy back to seeing farming as partnership with an ecosystem, even the most productive farmlands in the world suffer.

Old Wisdom and New Wisdom

One of Malawi’s greatest losses from the green revolution was the complete disappearance of the old ways. With it was lost the understanding that Malawians held about the rules to each particular ecosystem. That old wisdom was the bedrock upon which a successful partnership between each village and its ecosystem could be built. Perhaps the greatest lesson for India from is just how precious that old wisdom is.

I left the hot Malawian air depressed, because it seemed there was no solution to their quandary. After coming to India I hold the hope that I will be proven wrong. There is the potential here to forge new solutions, a synthesis of new and old wisdom. If we can capitalize on the contextual knowledge of the old wisdom, and the innovations and depth of scientific knowledge to our new wisdom, perhaps India will be able to forge a lasting partnership with its myriad ecosystems. Here lies the wisdom new and old that, enshala, can bring the rains to many lands.

You Know You Are In India When…

A collection of reflections.

 

1) You’re appalled by the smell of your own poop.

2) The goods hawked, the food sold, and the acts performed remind you of a carnival and you’re on a commuter train.

3) At the least, you spend two hours in the act or the discussion of poop every day.

4) You can’t find a public rubbish bin. No really. They just don’t exist.

5) At any given time, there is a man visible who is currently in the act of pissing against a wall.

6) You can’t walk a block without passing a tea stall.

7) The street food is sublime and the four-star restaurant gives you Typhoid.

8 ) You were on stage that last time you had this may sets of eyes staring at you.

9) Pedestrian flyovers are, as a rule, strategically placed to provide a birds-eye view of an open-air urinal.

10) Taken on balance, you spend more time sick than healthy—and so do the locals.

11) The richest neighborhood in the city still gets only two hours of water a day.

12) A gold-clad, Mercedes driving Begum will spend a vigorous five minutes in argument with a roadside clothes hawker in order to drop the price of a scarf by 20 rupees (50 cents).

13) An acceptable commute for a household servant could involve swimming through floodwaters with a change of clothes balanced on her head.

14) All within earshot of each other, 12 consecutive taxi-wallahs ask you if you need a ride. What optimism!

15) A bus will come to a complete stop for an old cow blocking the road, and in the block following will intentionally sideswipe a cheeky biker that got in the way.

16) You count the people visible, subtract the number of pairs of eyes staring at you, and the difference is the number of men pissing against a wall…

17) You can sit down on a train, and rest assured that whoever sits across from you will supply a lecture on some aspect of Indian life, and kindly attempt to correct your misperceptions of your own country.

And the number one way to know you’re in India is:

18) You guessed it: the smell. Poopurineincensesweatymantrashheapearthydieseltea. But mostly poop. Sniff it once, and you’ll know India-in-a-bottle any time you encounter it ever again.