Good Complexity, Bad Complexity

Originally published March 6, 2011

It’s been a season of mechanical breakdowns here this winter. The batteries for our solar PV system started acting up this past Fall, and the condition has steadily deteriorated so that now they’re only holding a charge for about a day. Off-grid systems like ours are sized to provide five days of charge without sun in winter, so this is a drop in capacity of 80%—pretty dramatic. We’ve lived with solar for eight years; the golf cart batteries we started off with lasted the full five years they were designed for. So I figured for our next set we were ready for the newer, more powerful, and better batteries that are supposed to last twelve years. They’re now three years old. Then a month ago our laptop suddenly stopped working. The computer tech I took it to was able to save our data, but he said the laptop was beyond repair. I bought another used one on e-bay. Two days ago the 4-wheel drive on my truck stopped working while I was driving up the driveway of a client to deliver a door.

A solar PV system, a computer, and a truck are all complex systems. As technological systems grow in complexity, the opportunities for failure of the whole system increase. I don’t know which component of the computer failed, but when it did the computer stopped being a computer and became a waste disposal problem. When the batteries of the solar PV system lost 80% of their effectiveness, the entire system lost its effectiveness by an almost equal amount—it still works at 100% only when the sun is shining. The truck runs, but with ice and snow still on back roads, it is useless going up hills and dangerous going down them or around curves. Both the truck and solar PV system will require an input of additional resources to fix. This is true of technological complexity generally. It solves a problem, but only at the cost of ongoing inputs of resources and energy. 

Complex technologies also have the additional problem of unintended consequences. The automobile, one of the most pervasive and probably the most transformative technology of the twentieth century, provides a dramatic example. For while it solved the “problem” of personal transportation over large distances, the additional problems it has left in its wake are legion and in most cases intractable: automobiles have devastated landscapes; resulted in 40,000 American deaths on average every year for the past forty years; require in total more oil than the country has had available domestically since the 1970s; require an infrastructure of roads and highways that costs billions of dollars every year to maintain; have contributed more than any other single factor to global warming; and require an ongoing program of mining and drilling that must continue forever or until we are forced by the inevitable resource depletion to abandon the project altogether.

In the past couple of posts I’ve written about complexity and diversity as positive features of ecologies, pointing to the increase in both over the history of life from its beginnings to the present as evidence of progress and an increase in stability and resilience. This is the complexity that is seen in native ecologies such as forests and grasslands, and in organisms such as dragonflies, whales, porcupines, and us. Life began as very simple ecosystems of single-cell organisms, and over the course of four billion years evolved into the complex, diverse forms and ecologies that make up the living world we have today. This then is good complexity, complexity that works. It is the result of millions of years of adaptation and evolution.

An example: In the twentieth century a blight killed all the chestnut trees in the eastern forest of North America. This was one of the most common (and most useful to people and animals) trees in the forest, in some places making up 50% of the forest canopy. When the chestnuts died, ripples were felt throughout the forest, but the forest itself was never in danger. Other species moved in to fill the gaps left by the chestnuts, and today a casual observer unaware of the missing chestnuts would have no way of knowing that a key species had vanished from the ecology. Other species eradicated from the eastern forest since European settlement include mountain lions, wolves, caribou, elk, bison (which ranged as far east as Massachusetts in the 17^th century), passenger pigeons, and Carolina parakeets, to name just some of the larger, more charismatic losses. Yet the forest endures, impoverished, but still with enough resilience to regenerate itself year after year.

The other side of the complexity coin is simplicity, and it works in exactly the way you would think. Simple ecologies are prone to failure and therefore require ongoing external inputs to be maintained. As simple ecologies in nature are rare exceptions to the rule of complex ones, they are most often human creations—fields of wheat, corn, cotton, soy, plantations of pine, spruce, etc. Simple technologies, on the other hand, are less prone to failure than complex ones and require fewer resources to maintain. A knife blade will dull, a ceramic pot may break, but the cost of fixing these problems is small. 

So why don’t societies solve problems using ecological complexity and technological simplicity? They did. Hunter-gatherer societies relied almost entirely on ecological complexity to acquire their food, shelter and energy. It is well known among archaeologists and paleoanthropologists that hunter-gatherers ate a far more varied and nutrient-rich diet than did early agricultural people. The evidence on this is by now unambiguous. The results of this solution to the problem of food are also unambiguous: as an average, hunter-gatherers were taller, lived longer, and were less prone to disease, malnutrition, cavities, and starvation than early farmers. To achieve this they also worked fewer hours per week than farmers. Our own cartoon version of the human story—that life before the comforts and conveniences of civilization was “nasty, brutish, and short,” in Thomas Hobbes pithy formulation—still prevails among those committed to a story of human progress from primitive to advanced regardless of any evidence. In fact the opposite more closely fits the facts. As Jared Diamond put it in his provocatively titled essay, The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race, “Hunter-gatherers practiced the most successful and longest-lasting life style in human history. In contrast, we’re still struggling with the mess into which agriculture has tumbled us, and it’s unclear whether we can solve it.”

Why then don’t complex agricultural societies, or the even more complex civilizations that they sometimes evolve into, rely on ecological complexity to solve problems? Because by their very nature they are committed to ecological simplicity. Their size, population density and social complexity are in most places the result of grain monocultures. Over time they evolve stories, myths, rituals, and religions centered on their life-giving grains, whether wheat, corn, or rice. The grains become money and the money supports the elites who tell the stories, organize the rituals, and celebrate the religions. Economics is the story of extremely simplified ecologies. Those fields of grain are so compelling not because they work better than other options, but because they pay better. The shortest economic history of the world can be written in twelve words: wheat, corn, rice, cattle, copper, tin, iron, gold, silver, coal, oil, gas. An unabridged version might include another twenty or so words—barley, millet, potatoes, sheep, horses, etc—but here are the main commodities that the major civilizations of the world have been built on. Our own civilization, global in extent and technologically complex almost beyond belief—depends more or less on all of them. I only intentionally left out wood, probably the most important natural resource of all, because it has been central to virtually all human societies going back well before the evolution of Homo sapiens. 

Once a society commits to ecological simplicity, once it sacrifices its native ecology for fields of grain, technological complexity becomes the only available solution to the problems of food, shelter, and energy—problems that are most often exacerbated by the move away from ecological complexity itself. In most places today grain monocultures are kept from failure by the addition of fossil-fuel derived pesticides and fertilizers. (If you wanted to design a food system vulnerable to disruption or collapse, it would be hard to do better than a combination of ecological simplicity and technological complexity). More often than not, the technologies developed, such as military and maritime technologies in ancient societies and mining and drilling technologies in modern ones, have been used to solve the ongoing need for food, shelter, and energy by expanding into, controlling, and exploiting frontiers. Our particular problem at this moment in history is that there are no more frontiers available to exploit.

The different effects of ecological complexity on the one hand and technological complexity on the other can be seen by comparing North America in 1491 and 2011. With over 400 distinct languages and tribal groups with economies organized around very diverse ecologies, the societies of North America in 1491 were ecologically complex but technologically simple. They were resilient and durable as a whole, and a collapse of one, Cahokia say, had no impact at all on most of the others. The societies of North America today, on the other hand, are dazzling in their technological complexity, but very simple ecologically, with only three languages and a single economic system dominating the entire continent. To the extent that the economy has reduced the continent’s native complex ecologies to a very few essential commodities—oil, coal, gas, corn, wheat—it is vulnerable to continent-wide systemic collapse should any of them become unavailable or fail. 

In building a homestead economy we’ve put most of our time, energy, and resources into solving our need for food, shelter, and energy by relying on ecological complexity. At the same time we’ve tried to minimize our investment in technological complexity, using it where necessary to function in our society and in the broader economy, but understanding that these systems are resource sinks and are vulnerable to failure. I’ve taken the same approach in my business of designing and building houses: use the complexity inherent in the native forest ecology to solve problems wherever possible, and use technological complexity sparingly and with the understanding that it is prone to ongoing issues of maintenance, repair, and failure.

Resources:

Peter Matthiessen’s first book Wildlife in America is both an informative work of natural history and a moving elegy to the losses to North America’s native fauna since European settlement. It includes a chapter on the eastern forest.

Diamond’s essay, quoted above and written in 1987, was I think the first popular account to suggest that the lives of hunter-gatherers were superior in most respects to early farmers. He covers similar material in more depth in his best-selling, Pulitzer-prize winning book Guns, Germs and Steel. 

Civilizations: Culture, Ambition, and the Transformation of Nature by Felipe Fernandez-Armesto is an ambitious, intentionally provocative history that places the large civilizations that grew up around the Nile, Tigris, Euphrates, Indus, Yellow, and Yangtze river valleys and occupy center stage in most world histories into a much broader context of people interacting with various environments in various ways in all corners of the world. Like Diamond, he too rejects the progressivist view of history, writing, “history has no course; nothing is inevitable, and progress, in general, is still awaited.”

The Backyard Frontier

Originally published February 27, 2011

As most people who follow energy issues or peak oil closely are well aware, the International Energy Agency declared that global production of conventional crude oil peaked in 2006 and was unlikely to ever return to those levels. This then represents the end of the historical epoch I have chosen to call the Age of Frontiers, which we can date from 1492 to 2006. Although there are still other, smaller frontiers that will continue to be exploited, none is large enough or expanding quickly enough to offset the effects of the closing of the oil frontier. We are in a new age now, one for which we don’t have a map or blueprint, and for which the assumptions about how the world works that we have taken for granted all our lives will be inadequate. With the end of the Age of Frontiers the changes in the years and decades and centuries ahead will likely be as dramatic and wrenching and unanticipated—although different and more compressed—as the changes of the last 514 years.

History is written at the level of cultures or states or continents or even sometimes of the entire planet, but it is lived at the level of the individual. Each of us in the Americas lives on land that was once a frontier in the economic juggernaut that formed and then swept around the world over the past 500 years. Our home here on the coast of Maine was a part of that frontier in the 17^th to 19^th centuries. The commodities it offered were wood and pasturage and then wood again. In the years since, the land has been used and abused, the native ecology broken and sold off in parts. 

The story of your land is different in the details, but similar in overall pattern, no matter where in North America you live. In the cities the finely wrought web of relationships worked out over millions of years of adaptation and selection has been paved over and all but eradicated. In the suburbs the ecology has been simplified to varying degrees, with useless monocultures of non-native grass interrupted by scattered trees, foundation plantings, and flower beds the norm. On the farms the same process of simplification has taken place, with the few commodity food plants and animals that speculators find most easily saleable replacing native prairies or forests.

But I don’t intend to turn this entry into an extended song of loss. I want instead to explore the opportunities offered by these degraded landscapes. For as global frontiers close, three consequences will result—are already underway in fact. First, economies will shrink. Second, necessity will force us all to conserve resources as a matter of habit. Third, many of us will turn to internal frontiers, which offer resources too small and dispersed to be of interest to the global economy and frontier speculators, but which can form the backbone of a resuscitation of homestead economies.

The frontier that occupies most of our own time and attention is the one that begins at our front door. Our mostly forested property was last logged in the mid-70s, and at least several times prior to that. When we bought it, it exhibited all the signs of having been integrated into the cold logic of a commodity economy: a severe reduction of biodiversity, too many diseased and dead trees for its young age, a lack of structural and habitat diversity. No one had loved it or woven their lives into its rich tapestry or enchanted themselves with stories about its magic for several centuries. From the time it entered the frontier economy, it was economically useful, no more, no less. Except for the specific details, the story of your land, the place you call home, is probably not that different.

In last week’s post I established the increase in diversity and complexity over the whole history of life on earth as the first principle that structures our understanding of the world and guides our actions. The evolutionary biologist Edward O. Wilson calls this trend an undeniable form of progress. I have come to think of it as the meaning and purpose of life. I already had this in mind when we moved here eight years ago, but I hadn’t worked out its full ramifications. I still haven’t, and expect that it will be a process that will occupy a part of my thinking for the rest of my life, but I’m further along now than I was then. One conclusion seems obvious: since the record shows beyond any doubt that diversity and complexity are features of resilient, durable ecologies, to the extent that we can integrate our homestead economy (and the broader economy) into that diversity and complexity, it too will be resilient and durable.

From our first year here we’ve used techniques from permaculture and forest gardening to create diverse guilds of layered plantings, and we also put in a more or less conventional vegetable garden. As I’ve described previously, we created habitats for small mammals, reptiles, and amphibians. But our understanding of diversity was limited, and we were thinking only in terms of the diversity of plants and animals. But as I did what research was possible—ecology is still a very young field, and the gaps in knowledge are enormous—I realized that it isn’t possible to create an ecosystem anywhere near as diverse as a native one, even if it mimics it in structure and emphasizes a diversity of plant species and wildlife habitats. 

The reason is that native species are already integrated into a network of species, particularly among insects, that are simply not able to make use of alien species in the same way. I owe this insight to the original research of Douglas W. Tallamy and the other primary research he has collected in his outstanding book Bringing Nature Home. He is a pioneer and the work of mapping the relationships that make up biodiversity is still in its infancy. If there’s one tool we desperately need, it’s a map showing the relationships among all the species—which species depends on which other species for survival. We don’t even have a list of all the individual species yet, but what we do know reveals that native plant species support a much higher number of insect species—and therefore a higher number of bird, reptile, amphibian, and mammal species that eat the insects—than nonnative plant species. Diversity is our first principle, and if we’re committed to restoring it to our land, the only way to do it to the fullest extent possible is to add native species back into the forest ecology. Each native plant species we add multiplies the diversity by 10 or 50 or 100, while non-natives might only multiply it by one or two or three.

So if I plant a native highbush blueberry I am adding much more diversity back into the forest ecology than if I plant an apple. We’ve planted both, but our emphasis has shifted over the past couple of years. Now our first priority is to use natives wherever possible, and then to use non-natives to round out our diet. So as we integrate our homestead economy into the forest ecology, a hierarchy of plants has emerged: 1. Native forest species. 2. Native field species. 3. Non-native forest species. 4. Non-native field species. Here in New England we are blessed with a large selection of delicious native edible forest species, including blueberry, blackberry, grape, huckleberry, raspberry, American plum, beach plum, persimmon, cranberry, serviceberry, currant, elderberry, hazelnut, hickory, walnut, chestnut, at least a dozen mushroom species, and quite a few edible herbaceous and root plants. Planting any or all of these helps rebuild the forest’s plant and wildlife diversity, gives us lots of delicious food, cuts down our food bills, and reduces the need for commercial monocultures and transportation energy. The native plants require much less tending than the non-natives, since the insects that feed on them have predators that are already present in the ecology. 

We take the same approach to shelter and energy, asking first, “How can we get a building and energy from the forest while at the same time restoring its diversity and complexity.” Since we know that dead wood on the ground is an essential component of forest health, and that gardening on forest time means cycles measured in decades and centuries, we want to take as little wood out of the forest as possible. So we build our house to last at least as long as a forest takes to mature. We also build to minimize maintenance and external energy requirements. I want to take these issues up in much greater detail in the coming weeks, so I’ll leave it there for now.

The land outside our front door is no longer a frontier. It is once again becoming an intact, vibrant, diverse ecology; it produces no commodities and attracts no speculators, but it is the wild beating heart of our homestead economy. As we restore the forest’s native diversity and eat its abundant fruits, the line between us and our land is blurring. We are becoming one of the strands in the forest’s rich tapestry of life. We are coming home. 

Resources: 

Although we got another fifteen inches of snow this week, it’s the time of year for ordering tree and shrub seedlings. We rely on three nurseries for most of our purchases: Fedco Trees here in Maine, St. Lawrence Nursery in NY state, and Oikos Tree Crops in Michigan. This last is particularly useful for anyone on a budget or planning extensive plantings, as they offer small seedlings and cultivars at a very reasonable price. They’re also now selling some of the herbaceous perennials associated with forest gardening.

One book I probably won’t get to mention anywhere in the year I have planned for this blog—so I’ll just mention it here because I enjoyed it so much and because it does provide the kind of ecological map I mentioned above—is Mannahatta by Eric W. Sanderson. It’s a recreation of the ecology of Manhattan on the day in 1609 when Henry Hudson sailed up the river that now bears his name. This was my home turf for most of my twenties, and I can’t help but note that outside of the parks the ecology today is dominated by humans, rats, pigeons, and cockroaches. Draw your own conclusions.

A Ground to Stand on

Originally published February 21, 2011

 

A homestead economy needs to be flexible, and a winter of very heavy snow has forced me to adjust my building plans. During my work week the storms and three-plus feet of snow on the ground have chased me inside the shop to make cabinets for one house and doors for another. For our own addition my original plan to drag or carry logs out of the forest and then hire or trade with a farmer/contractor friend who owns a portable sawmill to come over and help saw the logs into timbers isn’t possible. So I decided to cut the trees and hew the logs in place, then carry the lighter timbers out once the snow has melted. Hewing is quite a bit slower than a sawmill, but it was also my first choice, since I particularly like the rippled surface of a hand-hewn timber. The snow gave me the excuse I needed to accept that the project is going to take longer than I first planned.

It’s been four years since I’ve worked on a project that involved hewing for most or all of a day, and my muscles and technique suffered the first couple of days from the long layoff. The work was much harder than it needed to be, since I was forcing it rather than finding an easy rhythm and letting the axes (felling ax for scoring, hewing ax for finishing the surface) do the work. As a result my muscles tired more quickly, and then the quality of the work suffered since I had less control of the hewing ax as I squared the side of the log down to the line. Since timber framing is my livelihood, I expect the results to be professional, and when they’re not I get frustrated. So for a couple of days I was at war with myself. This week was better.  I stopped pushing and settled down into a consistent rhythm, and the pleasure I’d found in the work before returned. I wouldn’t want to do it day after day and year after year, but going into a forest with a couple of axes and turning trees into timbers is one of the things I’ve most enjoyed in the time I’ve been building and renovating timberframes.

I haven’t written very much here about the relationship between building and ecology yet, which probably seems a little odd for a blog published by someone whose livelihood is house-building. I plan to take it up in the weeks ahead, but I want to take this week to ground the various themes I’ve raised over the past couple of months on a solid foundation. When I’m building a house, my first choice of foundation material is stone—slabs of granite or field stone. Maine’s coast is famously rocky, so raw material is abundant, the stones are beautiful and last essentially forever, and even once the house that sits on the stone foundation decays, the foundation or the stones can be reused.  

The foundation I have in mind serves two purposes. It provides a ground for our story to stand on, and it guides and informs our actions as we try to build a homestead economy that is not at war with our native ecology. The memoir half of a philosophical memoir should stand on its own; at worst you’ll find our story uninteresting or unrealistic or find us disagreeable or flaky. We can live with that. But the philosophical half, the argument, needs a solid foundation, and I want something as hard and immovable and unassailable as the granite outcrops along the coast here. 

I’ve written that we came here to become part of an ecology, that we identify with the native forest, that we’ll work with the land to help it become what it wants to be, that we’ll make a place for ourselves within that context; that we’re seekers of happiness and richer, deeper experiences of being alive. All true. I’ve written that our economy, the economy that consumes frontiers, the economy that is rooted in agriculture and mining and drilling, the economy that too often levels native ecologies to extract the commodities they contain, has run out of new frontiers to exploit and so must inevitably begin to cannibalize itself. It defines the word unsustainable. I think that’s the best interpretation of the evidence. I’ve written that this economy has altered the makeup of the atmosphere, changed the climate, and reduced biodiversity to the point that life on earth is now in its sixth major extinction epoch. As a matter of verified scientific fact, yes. 

These concerns and convictions, our determination to live a certain set of principles, these are the values that animate our story. And there is the story’s weakness, for we’ve learned that values are relative. Yours may be different from ours. Your story may not be our story. Our story is certainly not the story of those who look at a landscape and see only resources to be exploited, or who see economic growth in and of itself as the highest good, or who believe that we stand apart from the wild green world, enabled by our intelligence and technologies, to conquer and subdue. But how will we judge whose story is better? Where is the unmoving ground on which that judgment depends?

This ground I’m searching for is a first principle, some unifying thing or principle or movement that can be used to explain the world and everything in it. The search for this first principle is as old as our western intellectual tradition; in fact it explicitly defines the very moment of birth of our intellectual tradition. It begins when Thales, the first of the Greek natural philosophers, seeks to discover the one thing that everything in the visible world is made of. Western philosophy begins with this single question. Thales is quickly followed by Anaximander and Anaximenes, who propose different answers to the same question. As Greek philosophical thought progresses through Parmenides and Pythagoras, it becomes increasingly abstract and the search to discover a material first principle is dropped in favor of purely theoretical organizing principles for the visible world. But the emphasis on a single, unchanging, eternal, unifying principle that orders the visible world with all its apparent complexity and change is nearly constant. 

By the time Plato adapts these ideas, another shift in emphasis has taken place as well: to Plato the material world of trees and rocks and rivers and flesh and bone is a deceptive, flawed, unredeemable mess that serves as nothing so much as an obstacle to true knowledge. He invents an invisible world of forms or ideas that are perfect and unchanging and eternal. The world that we see and experience with our senses is merely an imperfect imitation of that divine invisible world. That in a nutshell is Plato’s metaphysics. If you’re unfamiliar with the specifics but it all still sounds familiar, that’s because Plato’s notion of two worlds, one visible and corrupt and deceitful and the other invisible, perfect and pure provided the basic architecture for western ideas about the nature of reality and knowledge until the nineteenth century when the whole edifice came crashing to the ground.

I bring this all up here for two reasons. First it is simply impossible to overstate the importance of the development of Greek thought and culture from 750 BC, when literacy returned to the Mediterranean world following a 400-year dark age, to the death of Aristotle in 322 BC. Our culture, our institutions of learning, and especially our ways of organizing reality owe everything to this period. And second, because the defining feature of our intellectual tradition for the vast majority of its history is a conviction that unity is superior to diversity, simplicity is superior to complexity, that the spiritual is superior to the material, that being is superior to becoming. As I said above, as a metaphysics, the whole edifice came crashing to the ground in the nineteenth century, but the looming shadow and residue of that edifice are with us still. We are still living that legacy. Not at the highest levels of academia perhaps, but as a matter of cultural habit we still believe in unity, and one is still the number of divinity. 

A society, an economy, a culture organized around unity implies centralization, control, a diffusion of knowledge and intelligence from a single point. But ecology points to a different model entirely. Where is the center of a forest? It depends on rain and sun and warmth, but those are so elemental to almost all life on land that it makes little sense to talk of them as centers. They are preconditions. Intelligence in an ecosystem is diffuse. So is energy. Diversity and complexity are its most salient features. Try to photograph it and you quickly understand that no single point draws the camera. The forest is everywhere all at once. This is the key to ecological resilience. Try to kill the forest. The obvious way is to cut down or burn all the trees. But the forest’s DNA, its intelligence, is stored in the soil and it quickly regenerates itself. To kill it it must be destroyed again and again until all that stored intelligence has been wiped away. It can be done, but it requires continued, repeated assaults. Try to kill a centralized state, whether it is fed by oil or corn or wheat or coal. You don’t really have to do anything but wait. All its intelligence flows through its single fuel source and the military/administrative/religious establishment that feeds off it. Its resilience is limited by the resilience of that energy flow and that single cultural node. Cut that off, or wait for it to fail or run out, and the entire organization fails. History provides a nearly endless run of examples. As long as the frontiers are large or numerous enough, the centralized state can survive. But frontiers inevitably close. They closed for Athens when access to the timber it needed to rebuild its navy was cut off. They closed for Rome when the Iberian silver mines ran out and it had to debase its currency. They’re closing today in the Middle East as oil production declines and revenue streams dry up.

I’m suggesting that to the extent that our culture and economy are built on the intellectual tradition that began in Ionia in the sixth century BC, developed in Athens in the fourth, and prevailed throughout the Roman, medieval, Renaissance, and Enlightenment periods in Europe, it is vulnerable to collapse. Centralized systems aren’t resilient. Collapse—or restoration of a more dispersed state depending on your loyalties— is inevitable because it operates in direct opposition to the first principle that organizes the reality of living ecologies. 

This is the ground for our story. It expresses itself in a trend that is observable across the whole history of the living world. I think it qualifies as a first principle, and to the extent that it organizes the visible world, I think it is similar to what the early Greek philosophers were after. I think it is sound enough to form the basis for value judgments. For the purposes of building a homestead economy and ecology the forest itself is probably good enough as a starting point. Forests have existed for 350 million years. They’re ubiquitous, persistent, and resilient. They naturally occupy about half the land area of the planet. As I’ve written before, forests work. Other ecologies work too, but forest is what works here where we live, and probably where you live too, since forests and humans have many of the same requirements. The answer to why they work is also the answer to the search for a first principle on which to ground our story and our actions: diversity and complexity. Forests are the planet’s greatest terrestrial storehouses of diversity and complexity. The large majority of the planet’s land species are found in forests. Forests work because diversity and complexity work. As Edward O. Wilson put it in his book The Diversity of Life,

“Biological diversity embraces a vast number of conditions that range from the simple to the complex, with the simple appearing first in evolution and the more complex later. Many reversals have occurred along the way, but the overall average across the history of life has moved from the simple and few to the more complex and numerous…Progress, then, is a property of the evolution of life as a whole by almost any conceivable intuitive standard... It makes little sense to judge it irrelevant.” [italics mine]

It’s a memorable synopsis from one of the world’s foremost scientists. Life is up to something. It is becoming more diverse and more complex. Not always, and not in every place, but as an average across all of time from the beginning of life. Life may not have a goal, but the trend is unmistakable. The first principle that organizes reality has been with us all along. It’s the opposite of what the Greeks were looking for, the opposite of what the western intellectual tradition accepted as a given, but it’s what the world is made of, and it’s what we’re made of. And for what it’s worth, the same movement is seen in the history of the universe as well, from nothingness to singularity to a few elements to many, from simplicity to complexity. Diversity and complexity work, the evidence suggests that they are woven into the nature of things, and they express themselves most often on land as forests. 

That’s our rock, the granite upon which our story stands. We have a first principle. We can build an economy, make judgments, create new myths, find an intelligible context for history and the world around us. We can work within an ecology and be confident of our actions. Since intelligence is dispersed throughout the ecology, we can do less rather than more. We can watch and learn rather than dictate and control. We can build resilience and retake our place in the majestic pageant of life. We can revalue our commodities, restore our native ecologies and cultivate diversity and complexity. We might find our way back to Eden.

Resources:

The hewing ax I use is made by Gransfors Bruks. It’s a very nice tool, but the blade lacked the correct curvature when I first got it and I had to spend quite a bit of time modifying it. To hew properly and produce the rippled texture that makes hewn surfaces so appealing, the back of the blade should be slightly convex in both directions. The Ax-Wielder’s Handbook by Mike Beaudry is a good introduction to hewing.

I don’t have a good general-interest book to recommend on the development of Greek thought from the presocratics to Plato. The one I used in graduate school is The Presocratic Philosophers by Kirk, Raven, and Schofield. It’s the standard bilingual academic text, but best suited for someone who really wants to immerse themselves in the topic, as I once did. 

The Diversity of Life by Edward O. Wilson is one of the books that has most informed and influenced my thinking about biological diversity over the past couple of decades. I highly recommend it.

The Pursuit of Happiness

Originally published February 13, 2011

Two stories. One declares emphatically, with no trace of doubt: everything belongs to us. It is a story of conquest and control and ownership. This is our story, what I call the central organizing myth of our culture. All the land on the continent belongs to someone. Our land belongs to us. Not to you, not to the trees, not to the deer, not to the mosses, not to the ferns, not to the ruffed grouse. No one but us has any claim to it. We have the full force of a government and, should push come to shove, unprecedented killing technologies under the rule of law that we can call upon to defend our rights of ownership.

The other story says more humbly, more socially: we belong to the land. We are one part of the community of life. More specifically, we belong to the forest, for on our land forest is the ecology that life organizes itself into. We—Tanya and I and our two children—were born into the first story, so by birth, upbringing, and cultural habit, it is our story. But we prefer the other story, and we are trying to find ways to more fully make it ours.

On land all over the planet some version of these two stories is being played out. Look and listen to the land anywhere, and it’s usually not difficult to discern which story has the upper hand. On our land, our 8 acres on the coast of Maine, variations on these two stories have defined the landscape and the people on it for the past 12,000 years. Before that the land was under ice up to a mile thick, and before that, if current archaeological evidence holds, the land was truly a wilderness, unpopulated by human beings for all the rest of its history.

When the explorer Verrazzano landed on the coast of Maine in 1524, he noted that the natives didn’t cultivate the ground. This made them unusual among the tribes the explorers and early settlers encountered, for everywhere south of here on the Atlantic coast the natives grew corn, beans, and squash. But the Wabanaki people who lived here, specifically the Penobscots, got all their food by hunting, gathering, and fishing. It’s no romantic exaggeration to say they lived lightly on the land. They kept their populations quite low, somewhat under one person for every two square miles. The seafood of the coast and summertime foraging would have supported much higher numbers, but in winter they depended on hunting inland game for food, and that set the upper limit to their numbers. 

They modified the forest, but only to the extent of taking what they needed for firewood and to build their wigwams, birchbark canoes, baskets, pots, and other implements. Explorers noted that the forests here were very dense with conifers taller than any trees in Europe. There is no argument that the Penobscot lived within the ecological limits of the land. Or, put another way, they were the last people here who didn’t live on the land as if it were a frontier or depend on other frontiers to survive. When they were finally driven off the land in the 18^th century, they left little trace of their long history here. The forest was old growth, and the landscape was so close to a “natural” state that if we didn’t know better we would call it a wilderness.

Further back down the coast, in present-day Massachusetts and Rhode Island, tribes such as the Wampanoag and Narragansett kept the forest open by burning off the underbrush in spring and fall. Early explorers and settlers frequently commented on the open, park-like character of much of the forest. This modification accomplished two things: it made hunting easier, and it increased the populations of game animals and shrubs with edible fruit, such as blackberries and blueberries. Along with the cultivation of corn, beans, and squash, this allowed for population densities five to ten times higher than in downeast Maine. As in Maine, this economy existed within the ecological limits of the land, though the native ecology was modified to such an extent that no one mistook it for a wilderness, though its “natural” abundance was a theme of early colonial writings.

I’ve already described the agricultural practices of the colonial settlers who flooded into Maine in the years following the American Revolution. In brief, they cleared forest for grain crops and pasture, cleared more forest for firewood and building materials, and cleared yet more forest to make money, since wood was their most reliable cash crop. There is a famous painting by Blue Hill’s first minister, Jonathan Fisher, who was something of a Renaissance man. It shows the village and environs in 1824: fields, pastures, fences, an orchard, the nascent village and off in the upper left corner the last remnants of the native forest. This kind of field culture, imported wholesale from Europe, was capable of supporting about forty people per square mile. How long it might have done so is moot. (Thumbing through an early history of Blue Hill, I count the average number of children in a farm family at about ten—they needed a frontier, and a pretty big one at that). The late spring and summer of 1816 was a brutal one for farmers, with killing frosts in every summer month. The year is known in Maine lore as “eighteen hundred and froze to death.” One result was that Maine farmers came down with “Ohio Fever,” a general exodus of farmers from New England to the Midwest that never really ended. Although Maine’s frontier itself was still expanding, Ohio and Indiana were the new new frontiers: Ohio’s population doubled in six years; Indiana’s almost tripled.

Like the English settlers, we own our land. We are the inheritors of those traditions of land use and claims of ownership. To a certain extent, we get to choose the story we live on our land. But only to an extent.  If I had to choose one of the three worlds outlined above to inhabit, I would choose the Wabanaki’s without doubt or hesitation. Perhaps on the basis of the food alone, although the personal freedom and relative leisure would count very high too, as would the sense of belonging to an intact ecology and a stable culture not teetering on the brink of collapse. But that is an idle daydream. Our numbers alone have foreclosed the possibility of living as a hunter-gatherer in a near-wilderness. 

But what about possibilities of bringing wilderness home, of cultivating it? This immediately will seem a contradiction, I know, but that may say more about our culture and its uneasy relationship with the wild than about any inherent conflict between wilderness and cultivation. 

In 1964 Congress passed the Wilderness Act, creating formally designated wilderness areas protected by law. Its definition of wilderness is brief, and worth quoting in full:

“A wilderness, in contrast with those areas where man and his own works dominate the landscape, is hereby recognized as an area where the earth and community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain.”

I’ve been thinking seriously about those words and the relationship between cultures and the wild green world for a couple decades now. To a large extent it has been the material of my adult life ever since I left graduate school in the mid-90s. There was a time when I believed in the power of those words to protect wild, intact ecologies from the ravages of our economic juggernaut, but somewhere along the way I lost that faith. The act puts up fences and signs that read “keep out,” but fences and signs can come down, and I have little doubt that when we get desperate and really need what’s inside those fences, come down they will. And as Bill McKibben argued so eloquently and persuasively more than twenty years ago in “The End of Nature,” now that we’ve altered the atmosphere and the climate, no place is beyond the effects of our destructive economic arrangements. 

But what strikes me most about those words, beyond their ultimate inadequacy to protect, is their deep pessimism about the human place in the world. The Act assumes that any place inhabited by people will be degraded by that fact alone. This is undoubtedly a sound premise in the world dominated by a frontier economy, where every ecology it touches is in fact degraded or destroyed. But as a general principle the Act’s argument is flawed. It has nothing to say about the Wabanaki. Did they trammel the earth and the community of life? There is no evidence to suggest it. What about the Wampanoag and Narragansett? They certainly altered the landscape, in some places considerably, but none of the settlers who saw that landscape described it as degraded or destroyed. In fact it’s generally recognized that they increased the land’s diversity. But where the Act’s definition may fail us most terminally is in its refusal to consider the power of imagination to find another way. Like Genesis, it tells us that we are flawed. The only redemption it offers is the opportunity to visit a magnificent, pristine place, a reminder of the unsullied beauty of a world without us.

We reject that vision. We plant a hazelnut. It is wild, native to the eastern forest. We eat the nuts. So do the squirrels. We plant an American plum. It is wild, native to the eastern forest. We eat the plums. Some fall to the ground and wild turkey or bear eat them. We plant some cranberries, some blueberries, walnuts, hickories, chestnuts. We eat some.  Birds and animals eat others. We plant Jerusalem artichokes, chokeberry, elderberry, grapes, ostrich fern, milkweed, giant solomon’s seal. We eat some.  Birds and animals eat others. All are native to the eastern forest. We are cultivating a hunter-gatherer garden, modifying but not eradicating the forest ecology. Not so different from what the Wampanoag and Narragansett did, but more suited to our greater numbers. We are growing wildlife and insects and biological diversity. We are bringing wilderness home. We buy less food. We need fewer fields. Who will say to us or our children or our grandchildren in 50 years that this place isn’t wilderness? Maybe it won’t be in the strict, technical sense, but then it never was. People lived for millennia as part of the wildness—so will we. It will be here and it will be alive. With or without us.

Resources:

There are good native gardening books and good wild foods foraging books, but I don’t know of any book dedicated to cultivating wild native foods. The few forest gardening books available do include some of these species (not all), but focus much more on mimicking forest structure and ecology. This isn’t a flaw, just a different emphasis.

A few of the books we consult frequently, in addition to the forest gardening books I’ve listed previously:

“Native Plants of the Northeast” by Donald J. Leopold

“Bringing Nature Home” by Douglas W. Tallamy

“Noah’s Garden” by Sara Stein

“Nature’s Harvest” and “The Forager’s Harvest” by Samuel Thayer

Bringing Wilderness Home

Originally published February 7, 2011

Two stories. One declares emphatically, with no trace of doubt: everything belongs to us. It is a story of conquest and control and ownership. This is our story, what I call the central organizing myth of our culture. All the land on the continent belongs to someone. Our land belongs to us. Not to you, not to the trees, not to the deer, not to the mosses, not to the ferns, not to the ruffed grouse. No one but us has any claim to it. We have the full force of a government and, should push come to shove, unprecedented killing technologies under the rule of law that we can call upon to defend our rights of ownership.

The other story says more humbly, more socially: we belong to the land. We are one part of the community of life. More specifically, we belong to the forest, for on our land forest is the ecology that life organizes itself into. We—Tanya and I and our two children—were born into the first story, so by birth, upbringing, and cultural habit, it is our story. But we prefer the other story, and we are trying to find ways to more fully make it ours.

On land all over the planet some version of these two stories is being played out. Look and listen to the land anywhere, and it’s usually not difficult to discern which story has the upper hand. On our land, our 8 acres on the coast of Maine, variations on these two stories have defined the landscape and the people on it for the past 12,000 years. Before that the land was under ice up to a mile thick, and before that, if current archaeological evidence holds, the land was truly a wilderness, unpopulated by human beings for all the rest of its history.

When the explorer Verrazzano landed on the coast of Maine in 1524, he noted that the natives didn’t cultivate the ground. This made them unusual among the tribes the explorers and early settlers encountered, for everywhere south of here on the Atlantic coast the natives grew corn, beans, and squash. But the Wabanaki people who lived here, specifically the Penobscots, got all their food by hunting, gathering, and fishing. It’s no romantic exaggeration to say they lived lightly on the land. They kept their populations quite low, somewhat under one person for every two square miles. The seafood of the coast and summertime foraging would have supported much higher numbers, but in winter they depended on hunting inland game for food, and that set the upper limit to their numbers. 

They modified the forest, but only to the extent of taking what they needed for firewood and to build their wigwams, birchbark canoes, baskets, pots, and other implements. Explorers noted that the forests here were very dense with conifers taller than any trees in Europe. There is no argument that the Penobscot lived within the ecological limits of the land. Or, put another way, they were the last people here who didn’t live on the land as if it were a frontier or depend on other frontiers to survive. When they were finally driven off the land in the 18^th century, they left little trace of their long history here. The forest was old growth, and the landscape was so close to a “natural” state that if we didn’t know better we would call it a wilderness.

Further back down the coast, in present-day Massachusetts and Rhode Island, tribes such as the Wampanoag and Narragansett kept the forest open by burning off the underbrush in spring and fall. Early explorers and settlers frequently commented on the open, park-like character of much of the forest. This modification accomplished two things: it made hunting easier, and it increased the populations of game animals and shrubs with edible fruit, such as blackberries and blueberries. Along with the cultivation of corn, beans, and squash, this allowed for population densities five to ten times higher than in downeast Maine. As in Maine, this economy existed within the ecological limits of the land, though the native ecology was modified to such an extent that no one mistook it for a wilderness, though its “natural” abundance was a theme of early colonial writings.

I’ve already described the agricultural practices of the colonial settlers who flooded into Maine in the years following the American Revolution. In brief, they cleared forest for grain crops and pasture, cleared more forest for firewood and building materials, and cleared yet more forest to make money, since wood was their most reliable cash crop. There is a famous painting by Blue Hill’s first minister, Jonathan Fisher, who was something of a Renaissance man. It shows the village and environs in 1824: fields, pastures, fences, an orchard, the nascent village and off in the upper left corner the last remnants of the native forest. This kind of field culture, imported wholesale from Europe, was capable of supporting about forty people per square mile. How long it might have done so is moot. (Thumbing through an early history of Blue Hill, I count the average number of children in a farm family at about ten—they needed a frontier, and a pretty big one at that). The late spring and summer of 1816 was a brutal one for farmers, with killing frosts in every summer month. The year is known in Maine lore as “eighteen hundred and froze to death.” One result was that Maine farmers came down with “Ohio Fever,” a general exodus of farmers from New England to the Midwest that never really ended. Although Maine’s frontier itself was still expanding, Ohio and Indiana were the new new frontiers: Ohio’s population doubled in six years; Indiana’s almost tripled.

Like the English settlers, we own our land. We are the inheritors of those traditions of land use and claims of ownership. To a certain extent, we get to choose the story we live on our land. But only to an extent.  If I had to choose one of the three worlds outlined above to inhabit, I would choose the Wabanaki’s without doubt or hesitation. Perhaps on the basis of the food alone, although the personal freedom and relative leisure would count very high too, as would the sense of belonging to an intact ecology and a stable culture not teetering on the brink of collapse. But that is an idle daydream. Our numbers alone have foreclosed the possibility of living as a hunter-gatherer in a near-wilderness. 

But what about possibilities of bringing wilderness home, of cultivating it? This immediately will seem a contradiction, I know, but that may say more about our culture and its uneasy relationship with the wild than about any inherent conflict between wilderness and cultivation. 

In 1964 Congress passed the Wilderness Act, creating formally designated wilderness areas protected by law. Its definition of wilderness is brief, and worth quoting in full:

“A wilderness, in contrast with those areas where man and his own works dominate the landscape, is hereby recognized as an area where the earth and community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain.”

I’ve been thinking seriously about those words and the relationship between cultures and the wild green world for a couple decades now. To a large extent it has been the material of my adult life ever since I left graduate school in the mid-90s. There was a time when I believed in the power of those words to protect wild, intact ecologies from the ravages of our economic juggernaut, but somewhere along the way I lost that faith. The act puts up fences and signs that read “keep out,” but fences and signs can come down, and I have little doubt that when we get desperate and really need what’s inside those fences, come down they will. And as Bill McKibben argued so eloquently and persuasively more than twenty years ago in “The End of Nature,” now that we’ve altered the atmosphere and the climate, no place is beyond the effects of our destructive economic arrangements. 

But what strikes me most about those words, beyond their ultimate inadequacy to protect, is their deep pessimism about the human place in the world. The Act assumes that any place inhabited by people will be degraded by that fact alone. This is undoubtedly a sound premise in the world dominated by a frontier economy, where every ecology it touches is in fact degraded or destroyed. But as a general principle the Act’s argument is flawed. It has nothing to say about the Wabanaki. Did they trammel the earth and the community of life? There is no evidence to suggest it. What about the Wampanoag and Narragansett? They certainly altered the landscape, in some places considerably, but none of the settlers who saw that landscape described it as degraded or destroyed. In fact it’s generally recognized that they increased the land’s diversity. But where the Act’s definition may fail us most terminally is in its refusal to consider the power of imagination to find another way. Like Genesis, it tells us that we are flawed. The only redemption it offers is the opportunity to visit a magnificent, pristine place, a reminder of the unsullied beauty of a world without us.

We reject that vision. We plant a hazelnut. It is wild, native to the eastern forest. We eat the nuts. So do the squirrels. We plant an American plum. It is wild, native to the eastern forest. We eat the plums. Some fall to the ground and wild turkey or bear eat them. We plant some cranberries, some blueberries, walnuts, hickories, chestnuts. We eat some.  Birds and animals eat others. We plant Jerusalem artichokes, chokeberry, elderberry, grapes, ostrich fern, milkweed, giant solomon’s seal. We eat some.  Birds and animals eat others. All are native to the eastern forest. We are cultivating a hunter-gatherer garden, modifying but not eradicating the forest ecology. Not so different from what the Wampanoag and Narragansett did, but more suited to our greater numbers. We are growing wildlife and insects and biological diversity. We are bringing wilderness home. We buy less food. We need fewer fields. Who will say to us or our children or our grandchildren in 50 years that this place isn’t wilderness? Maybe it won’t be in the strict, technical sense, but then it never was. People lived for millennia as part of the wildness—so will we. It will be here and it will be alive. With or without us.

Resources:

There are good native gardening books and good wild foods foraging books, but I don’t know of any book dedicated to cultivating wild native foods. The few forest gardening books available do include some of these species (not all), but focus much more on mimicking forest structure and ecology. This isn’t a flaw, just a different emphasis.

A few of the books we consult frequently, in addition to the forest gardening books I’ve listed previously:

“Native Plants of the Northeast” by Donald J. Leopold

“Bringing Nature Home” by Douglas W. Tallamy

“Noah’s Garden” by Sara Stein

“Nature’s Harvest” and “The Forager’s Harvest” by Samuel Thayer

Two Stories: Forests, Fields, Food

Originally published January 30, 2011

The coastal peninsula where we have our home is largely rural, with plenty of small local farms and a strong culture of organic farming, self-reliance, and back-to-the-land homesteading. Some of this culture is general to Maine, which has the oldest organic farming and gardening organization in the country and an even older tradition of rugged individualism. Some is specific to this peninsula, where Helen and Scott Nearing had their final homestead, and where the generation that followed in their wake is a strong local subculture. As a result there is no shortage of good fresh local food, or of people with lots of specific practical knowledge that a preindustrial farm family or modern homesteaders require. We take advantage of both: buying as much of our food from local farmers as possible and knowing that if we have a specific question about problems with a fruit tree, using seaweed for compost, keeping bees, making hard cider, finding seeds for herbs, or a thousand other things, the answer is only a phone call away. Of the five other families in my daughter’s homeschooling group, one owns a meat and dairy farm; another makes just about everything they use, including house, clothes, furniture and food; another runs a local food nonprofit and was formerly executive director of the Good Life Center, the nonprofit that maintains the Nearings’ last homestead and offers programs that advance their values and writings.

So when I write critiques of farming or agriculture, or of the economies that have evolved around them, it is not without a certain ambivalence.  Although I think the critiques are valid and necessary, I run the real risk of offending our friends and neighbors. On the one hand the local farmers and farm activists are among the small minority of Americans who care deeply enough about issues such as food sovereignty, social justice, and the equitable distribution of resources to dedicate their lives to improving them. On the other hand the tradition that we and they are a part of has been responsible for wholesale ecological destruction that really has no precedent in North America. Colonial and early American farmers leveled whole ecosystems, drove species to the brink of extinction or over, eliminated others that interfered with their farm economies, destroyed or displaced native cultures, and in the Southeast created vast agricultural economies based on slave labor. And while I believe that small organic farms are better in every sense of the word by at least an order of magnitude than the horror that is industrial agriculture, I also believe that the uglier side of agriculture and the uglier aspects of its history are too often glossed over. It is always easy to find a villain—some alien other—to blame for the world’s ills. The present favorites are corporations, the financial system, and corrupt governments. It is much more difficult to expose to hard scrutiny our own values, practices, and culture. We run the risk of finding the villain in a mirror.

I want to be clear, however, that the target of my criticisms is a culture, an economy, and the myths and values that support both. Individual family farmers today are more often victims than perpetrators of the vast crimes against the community of life that our culture commits as a matter of course. At worst they can be accused of not having spent the literally thousands of hours in research necessary to tease out the relationships among food, energy, history, ecology, money, profit, and demographics that are all implicit in our agricultural economy. All the family farmers I know lead very busy lives. None of them are getting rich. Most struggle to break even.

This past week we got a flyer from a local farmer we know. He wanted his customers to know that he was now certified organic and that he had just cleared another fifteen acres of forest to create a cow pasture where he would raise grass-fed beef. Everything in our culture right now is telling him that virtue is on his side. Local. Organic. Grass-fed. Traditional, like the colonial and early American farmers who first settled coastal Maine. When the farmer says that he cleared fifteen acres, he means that he removed the forest. Our semi-rural peninsula is today mostly forested, though the original old-growth forest was completely clearcut by the first generations of settlers, mostly between the American Revolution and 1820, when Maine became a state. 

In a blog post last week titled “An Affinity for Tree Groves,” Gene Logsdon suggested that after cutting down the “forest primeval”, Americans had a change of heart and decided to reverse the process. It’s a nice sentiment, but it isn’t supported by the facts. First, the idea that the European setters stumbled upon a primeval wilderness is a myth that has persisted despite the abundant evidence to the contrary. When the first European settlers arrived on the Atlantic coast, eastern North America was home to at least one to two million people. Most of the land was indeed covered in old-growth forest, though the natives had been hunting and gathering in it and cultivating and modifying it for millennia. It was more garden than wilderness, and if its abundance awed the early settlers (as their early writings attest), it may just be that the natives who called the forest home were damned fine gardeners. Second, the forests here on the coast of Maine returned after being cleared by the first wave of farmers because the farmers quickly moved to newly opened frontiers in the Midwest and then beyond. And Americans stopped cooking and heating with wood and switched to coal, oil, gas, and electricity. Since Maine farm families typically burned 20 cords of wood per year, that use alone represented an enormous pressure on the forests. Today 80% of people in Maine heat with oil and it is the most forested state in the country. The hard fact is that if modern Americans had an agricultural and energy economy similar to the early farm settlers, we would have no forests, no matter how much we liked trees. In fact, with our current population, such an economy— and the land uses it implies—is not even remotely possible. Our forest and Mr. Logsdon’s—and the very real pleasures we both derive from them—are artifacts of a fossil fuel economy. 

It is natural, or at least customary, to view the farmer’s clearing of his land from the perspective of the farmer, or of the diner who favors gourmet beef, or of the landscape painter or tourist who admires pastoral scenes, or perhaps even of the cows, who will have a happier, healthier life than their grain-fed, confined, industrial counterparts. The perspective that is ignored is the ecological one. The farmer’s ecology, if that term is even apt, is one taken piecemeal from arid grasslands and the floodplains of the vast rivers where grain agriculture began. Since it is alien to a forest ecology, the forest is simply removed. Our local farmer admitted in his flyer that he hated to see the trees go. But a forest isn’t just trees. The trees provide much of the structure, but the forest is habitat to a whole community of life: mosses, lichens, wildflowers, fungi, amphibians, reptiles, small and large mammals, birds, insects—oak trees alone support 534 species of moths and butterflies, which in turn support all the birds that eat them. What is lost is not only biological diversity, but an accumulated intelligence worked out over millions of years. I should say that if it were just a question of dotting the landscape with intermittent pastures, there would be an ecological benefit to the added habitat diversity—similar to that created by tree-toppling storms and fires. But that is not our recent past, and I don’t believe it is our future if we continue on our present path.

There is a story implicit in the farmer’s relation to the land, and it is our culture’s central organizing myth, the one that informs all the other stories we tell. The story is just a few words long, but its implications are widespread and profound. The story is this: everything belongs to us. It is the story that allows us to remove the mountaintops of West Virginia. It is the story that allows us to level the landscape of Alberta to get at the tar sands underneath. It is the story that gives me a piece of paper that says I own my land and every living thing on it, to do with as I please. The story invests me with enormous powers. But from an ecological perspective, they are powers of destruction. The power to create an ecosystem as complex and diverse as old-growth forest is no more within my grasp than is the power to conjure a solar system into existence. At best I can attempt to preserve it. More likely I’ll degrade it as I integrate it into the economy of money and profit. I might do it slowly, or all at once, but the incentives to do it one way or another are constant and the economy is structured to make them literally irresistible. I could clear our forest, feed our family, and probably make some money on the side—at the cost of removing the community of life that is here now. I won’t do it. I don’t want to be the protagonist of that story. It is the story of an exile, and I don’t want to live the exile’s alienated, lonely life, pursuing fantasies of dominion and control.

The story that whispers everything belongs to us is a very old story, but as I’ve written before, it is a relatively new one to North America. Here, as elsewhere, there is another story, even older. I think if we’re going to stop our culture’s rapidly escalating, terminal crises, more than anything we need to tell ourselves different stories about how the world works. We certainly need different stories if we’re not going to leave as our most enduring legacy a broken, impoverished world. There is little I can do to stop the holocaust that our economy is visiting on the planet’s ecologies. I can control how I make my living, where we get our food, which economies I support, but only to a certain extent. The one thing I can most easily change is the story I tell about the world and my place in it. If I can get the story right, the other necessary changes might more easily fall into place.

We eat meat. This year we shot a bear. We didn’t actually set out to kill a bear, but a bear in the neighborhood had become particularly aggressive. It broke into our car and then into a shed where we keep an ice box. Our two dogs would chase it at dusk every evening but it wouldn’t leave. We talked with the game wardens, who said that they just didn’t hear about this kind of behavior. They suggested shooting the bear. When we told them we had two young children who spent a lot of time outside, they said they would have shot it a week ago. I got out one of our wildlife books and looked up bear biology. Sows give birth to two cubs every other year. A black bear lives for about ten years. That means ten cubs in the life of a sow, eight more than the carrying capacity of the land can support. We knew from sightings and tracks that there was a female with a new cub in the neighborhood. A picture of what was happening formed. One of the bears from the previous litter was being pushed out of its mother’s territory, but had no territory of its own to move into. We shot the bear.  It was a 2-year-old male. When we skinned it we found two teeth punctures in its shoulder. This winter we ate bear meat. The bear lived on its own terms until the last day of its life. Its habitat, the forest, is intact. I can’t imagine a way to build a money economy on those relationships and values, and as long as our culture values money and profit above intact ecologies, the community of life will pay the price. But at the level of a homestead economy, a winter of bear meat works just fine. 

Here’s our story: we are the bear and the deer and the blueberry and the ostrich fern and the grape and the wild strawberry and the milkweed and the pine and the spruce and the oak. Here’s our commitment: to the extent possible, we will get our food and our shelter and our energy from the forest. We will add diversity back to the forest, starting with the numerous understory plants and tree species that were stripped out over the years. We will add other plants native to the eastern forest, but not to here. We will modify the forest where we need to, but only as little as possible, and always respecting its rhythms and patterns. We will take the knowledge we need wherever we can find it, from any tradition that has something to teach. We will only get our food from local artificial field cultures as a last resort and as part of a transition while we learn how to get our living from the forest ecology. Grasslands belong to other places with their own ecological intelligence. The forest is the ecology we have, the home we belong to. Here’s our story: we are the forest.

Resources:

Helen and Scott Nearing wrote many books about their experiences as homesteaders. The most popular is “Living the Good Life.”

I took the estimate of the native population in eastern North America at the time of European settlement from “Facing East from Indian Country” by Daniel Richter. The literature on interactions between Native Americans and the environment during the historic period and just before has grown considerably in the last quarter century.

Two good books cover the complex, often troubled relationship between forests and agricultural civilizations. “A Forest Journey” by John Perlin is particularly good on wood shortages, which were the chronic energy crises that seem to have afflicted all preindustrial civilizations.

“Forests: The Shadow of Civilization” by Robert Pogue Harrision is a study of the way forests have been portrayed in the literature of the West.

E Pluribus Unum: The Frontier Economy at Work

Originally published January 23, 2011

For a variety of reasons I’ve structured this blog as a chronicle that follows the course of a year on our semi-rural, 8-acre homestead. The seasons here in Maine are distinct, each with its own rhythms, particularly for a household that relies on the sun for its energy, heats with wood, and where employment involves a lot of outside work, as mine does. Winter days are short, and when night temperatures drop to zero or below and the weak sun is slow to warm the morning, time spent indoors is much longer than in any of the other seasons. I like the cold, but if I have a choice I’d just as soon wait until it’s at least 15 before getting going outside. This week two winter storms passed through, one at the beginning of the week and another at the end; snow falls outside as I write this. So it’s a good season for sitting by the wood stove during the long dark hours after an early dinner and trying to weave together the various strands of history, culture, ecology and economy that intersect at our forested homestead.

Between the storms I was back in our forest swinging an ax, cutting out trees: red maples for next year’s firewood, spruce for rafters for the addition we’re putting on our house. I’m still cutting out the smaller trees that will never break through the canopy of trees passed over when our property was last logged 30-some years ago. We’ve loosely adopted a plan from permaculture for our property, dividing it into four zones: Zone one includes our buildings and intensive edible forest gardens. Zone two is the next ring out and this is where I was logging. When we moved in eight years ago the forest was overgrown, with young, stunted spruce and fir trees growing as close as six inches together. Some of these were dead, others were dying. In most places there was no understory, and nothing growing at ground level. We’ve thinned repeatedly over the years, and now the smaller trees that remain are perhaps thirty feet tall, though the canopy is still overcrowded and the forest will benefit from this final round of thinning. In the meantime the increased sunlight reaching the forest floor and the release of nutrients has allowed life to begin reclaiming that space: mosses, bunchberry, and starflower; small wild raisin, highbush blueberry and winter holly shrubs, seedlings of oak and beech; and fungus that includes chanterelles, honey mushrooms, and various boletes. We happily gather and eat the blueberries and mushrooms. We’re also planting in this zone, and the long-term transition we have in mind is to a woodland with a canopy of nut and tall fruit trees (in addition to the mature pines, spruces, and maples already present), with a rich understory of mostly native smaller trees, shrubs, herbaceous perennials, and groundcovers. This is the most experimental part of our project, one that draws on several different traditions, and I’ll discuss the particulars in much greater detail come spring and summer, but for now I want to focus on the forest we have, its past and present place in the frontier economy, and the effects of that economy on the various ecologies it confronts and colonizes.

I call it the “frontier economy” because it is an economy that has only existed—until now—in the context of ever-expanding frontiers, that cannot actually function without frontiers, and that has created an academic discipline (economics) that takes it as a matter of faith that frontiers are permanent. Like all faiths, this one is at odds with reality in some of the details, which explains the odd disconnect between official pronouncements about future prospects for the economy and reality as it is experienced by most people. The two main frontiers that have defined economic activity and opportunities in the West for the past five hundred years (and now also the East) are the western hemisphere and its huge stores of wealth in the form of previously mined gold and silver, fisheries, forests, grasslands, and arable land; and the discovery of a planet’s worth of fossil fuels and the minerals those fuels allowed to be mined. 

In last week’s post I wrote that an economy produces the people it needs. Different economies need different kinds of people, but every economy needs elders or priests or bards to store the culture’s wisdom and to tell the stories that keep the culture organized. The stories mostly contain the message that if people do the right things then the gods or elites will favor them. Our own class of such priests is enormous, given that a fossil-fuel based economy requires so few people to do the actual work of farming, drilling, mining and making things and therefore has the energy and resources to support thousands of less essential occupations. The sheer volume of the songs of praise they sing to the frontier economy and consumer lifestyle can be maddening. (Besides, the lyrics are so damned insipid). The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, all of the major media belong to this priest class, as do our economists and politicians. All are creations of the frontier economy. When a culture is stable, and the economy is not exceeding its resource base, the priests’ odes of praise for the status quo are taken at face value and the priests are esteemed. Dissenters are relatively few, and are quickly dispatched or ignored. But when the economy wobbles or falters badly enough, and the culture begins to lose its bearings, the apostates grow in number and their claims that the priests may be liars or fools grow bolder. More people are willing to listen and consensus begins to disintegrate. For the past five hundred years anyone betting against future growth and prosperity (at least in the terms understood by the frontier economy), even in the depths of the worst depressions, was making a fool’s bet. The frontiers were all but limitless. Many minor frontiers have closed over the years, barely making a difference to the broader economy, which always had newer, bigger frontiers to exploit. But the peak in conventional crude oil represents the first closing of a major frontier, and it’s no accident that parts of the economy wobbled at just the moment when the price of oil made the effects of that closing frontier obvious. At this point the question to ask the priests is this: Where is the next frontier? (Answers involving some mystical frontier of the mind deserve no response other than rude laughter).

Today’s frontiers are well known: the tar sands of Alberta, the oil fields of Iraq, the mountaintops of West Virginia, the deepwater oil fields, and other remote locales that are too often now where the remaining fossil fuels and minerals are to be found. These are difficult frontiers, requiring extreme technological sophistication, huge investments of capital and energy, and risking significant ecological damage or accepting such damage as a given cost of doing business. Frontiers always involve high risks and therefore high costs, and the frontier economy of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, centered on the East Coast of North America was no different. The risks and costs of that time involved military competition among the nations vying for control of the frontier and dispossession of the natives by main force who called the frontier home. It’s worth following several stages of the frontier as it moves up the Maine Coast on foot, rides down the Penobscot River on a logging drive, and then travels down the Atlantic Coast for trade with Barbados, the British empire’s wealthiest colony in the 17^th century and one of the purest incarnations of incipient capitalism.

The frontier economy arrived in Maine at the beginning of the seventeenth century, same as Massachusetts (of which it was a part until 1820), but unlike that colony, which grew rapidly after 1630, it was settled sparsely and hesitantly until the eighteenth century. (Just offshore was a different story, where the cod fishery was already a valuable component of Europe’s frontier economy in the century before New England was settled). Maine, like the rest of New England, was fully inhabited at the time of European settlement, as it had been for more than ten millennia—in this instance by the various tribes of the Wabanaki Confederacy. The economy of these tribes was different from those of southern New England, the crucial difference being that corn cultivation, if present at all, was of limited importance. The Wabanaki made their living hunting, fishing, and gathering mollusks, fruits and vegetables. They also created one of history’s great transportation technologies: the birchbark canoe.

The Wabanaki economy was entirely dependent on the native ecology of woodland and coast. The English settlers, on the other hand, brought with them the economy of fields and pastures that formed the lifeblood of their culture. The economic distinction then is only superficially between Native American and European; the essential one is between field culture (agri- in agriculture is from the Latin for field) and forest culture. The same distinction can be found in Europe, though it is buried more deeply in the past. The family farmers who settled the coastal regions of Maine were small players in the frontier economy. Maine absorbed the excess people from the rapidly growing colonies to the west, an excess that in Europe would have been absorbed by famine, disease, or war. But their impact on the ecology of the forest was extreme, and from our vantage at the beginning of the twenty-first century, permanent. The typical farmer migrated northeast from Massachusetts alone or with his young family, cleared five or six acres of forest, burned the land and planted corn, wheat, English hay, and rye, and pastured cows, sheep, pigs, oxen, and perhaps a horse. The forest they cut was old growth, the immense size of the trees a matter of historical record. One farmer boasted of standing his team of oxen on the stump of a spruce he had just cut. Some of the trees were used to build houses, first a log cabin, and then later a framed house if the farmer could afford it. The farmer continued cutting trees, many for firewood, since a typical farm household burned 15 to 20 cords each year. Other trees were sold, often as clapboards or timbers to the West Indies, which was an important trading partner to New England.

The reconciliation of a mixed farm economy of grain crops and pasturage for grazing animals and a forest ecology is not an easy one. Grasses are annual plants that grow on disturbed ground; forests are perennial polycultures that can persist for centuries without significant disturbance, particularly in the moist coastal climate of New England. The farmer’s solution then, as now, was to simply remove the forest and all of the life it supported, using or selling off those parts that had some economic value. And the forest fell quickly. With the threat from natives and the French removed by the 1760s, Maine’s population exploded, from less than 30,000 in 1770 to just over 151,000 in 1800, a fivefold increase in less than 30 years—a rate of growth only possible in a frontier economy. There are 19^th-century paintings of the Blue Hill Peninsula, from where I write, that show a landscape almost entirely devoid of trees. It looks more like a pastoral scene from the English countryside than a landscape that had until recently been forested for 10,000 years. The effect of the early frontier economy along the coast was to level the forest and replace it with the field culture of small farms imported wholesale from England. Our own forested property, four miles outside the village of Blue Hill that was established during the population boom, was probably first cleared in the middle of the 19th century, when the farmhouse up the road was built. The barbed wire I found embedded in an old cedar stump suggests that it was used for pasture. 

By that time Maine was a state and its economic frontier had moved north, up the Penobscot River to the small city of Bangor, gateway to the state’s vast forested interior, the justly famed Maine Woods. Here the frontier economy accelerated from the subsistence and modest income of small family farms along the coast and rivers to the pure commodity economy of timber. By 1830 Bangor was known as the “Lumber Capital of the World,” with the speculative frenzy that all frontier boomtowns seem to attract. One participant noted: “Broker’s offices…were crowded from morning until night and frequently far into the night by buyers and sellers. All were jubilant, because all, whether buyers or sellers, were getting rich. Not one in 50 knew anything about the lands he was buying, nor did he care to know as long as he could sell at a profit. Lands bought one day were sold the next day at a large advance. Buyers in the morning were sellers at night. The lands were bought and sold over and over again, until lands which had been bought for a few cents an acre were sold for half as many dollars. As is always the case when speculation is rampant and inexperienced men become speculators, dishonesty was in the ascendant.” If that sounds like the most recent real estate craze and mortgage fiasco, it’s no coincidence. All frontiers close, and all booms go bust. Today Bangor, which once spoke of “Boston and New York as sisters,” is a small unassuming city renowned for nothing so much as being home to the popular writer Stephen King. 1872 was the year of “peak wood” in the city, when 246 million board feet worth $4 million were carried down the river. Maine still produces a lot of timber each year, but the frontier moved on and timber harvests are stable or declining. As a matter of ecology, only 6,000 acres of old growth remain in the state—everything else was clearcut at least once. Maine’s giant trees are gone (though the forests in the parks and preserves are slowly recovering), and the industrial “forests” are now often planted in single-species stands sprayed with herbicides and cut on 30-year rotations. 

Most Americans seem to know at least the official histories of colonial New England and Virginia, but few seem to know much at all about Barbados, England’s third Atlantic frontier. It’s unfortunate, since Barbados’ sugar plantations of the 17^th century reveal the workings of the frontier economy in its purest, most unrestrained, venal, and pathological form, the one that helped to usher in modern capitalism. Sugar cultivation, harvesting, and processing required more capital and labor than any other colonial crop. It was a rich man’s game, but the profits were so great that virtually every living thing and every human life on the small island of Barbados became subservient to sugar. First, the native forest was cleared, taking most of the wildlife with it. The whole island was planted in cane, a vast monoculture where no room was spared even for subsistence crops. Food and wood were both shipped in from New England, even at high prices. Labor initially was English indentured servants, then criminals and political prisoners, finally African slaves. The brutal working conditions, tropical diseases, overcrowding, and poor diet killed them all by the thousands. Average life expectancy for newcomers to the island was about seven years. Even the plantation owners died, but the promise of quick riches kept them coming. In 1700 Barbados had a population density four times higher than England’s. The majority were slaves. Threats of rebellion were constant, and the planters lived with a siege mentality, relying on torture, castration, and execution to maintain order. Sugar was an insatiable maw that consumed almost every living thing and spit out money. A new kind of ecology was created, unusual in its purity: sugar was a super-predator, enslaving and consuming all other life-forms. It was the frontier economy in its purest form, for sugar represented nothing but profit, the opportunity to increase capital year after year.

On the face of every American coin is the Latin phrase e pluribus unum. It means “from many, one” and refers to the United States. But it is also a concise description of how the frontier economy works in the world. It could easily serve as the frontier economy’s motto and rallying cry, and it should come as no surprise that it is printed on our money. The frontier economy is above all a great leveler and a great simplifier of both cultures and ecologies. Confronted with any undisturbed ecology, the frontier economy selects the element or elements that can be sold at a profit, and discards the rest. If the element is profitable, trees say in Maine, it will cultivate them. If a valuable commodity is hidden beneath the ground, copper or coal perhaps, it will simply expunge the aboveground ecology wholesale. While this is not something entirely new in the world—all expanding economies require frontiers—the scope of the process is. For it now encompasses the entire planet and impacts all ecologies. The line on the graph has gone vertical. The frontier economy has altered the atmosphere and changed the climate. It is eliminating human cultures and languages at a rate never seen. When it appeared in North America there were more than 400 distinct languages and native cultures. Individual ecologies are no longer being pushed aside or plowed under, now the entire diversity of life is being set back, and we have a species extinction rate last seen 65 million years ago, when a meteor smashed into the side of the planet and brought the Age of Dinosaurs to a close. This is not just another historical cycle that will soon revert back to a trend line. This is irreversible, epochal change on a geological timescale.

This is the most salient feature of the frontier economy: it is opposed to the most basic processes of life. For if we wanted to sum up the whole 4-billion-year history of life in a phrase, it would go something like this: from one, many; from many, more. (The same phrase might serve as well for the history of the entire universe). A movement toward diversity seems woven into the fabric of life. This is how ecologies work. This is how life works. It may be the closest we ever get to the elusive concept known as progress. It is the process that produced the millions of species that science still doesn’t have a number for. It is the process that produced forests and grasslands and estuaries and oceans of indescribable diversity and complexity. And it is the process that produced us. 

We don’t just need to adjust to an economy no longer able to grow. We don’t need new “green” technologies that will allow the growth to continue. We need to develop habits of thought and stories and cultures and economies that are not inimical to the basic processes of life. And sooner or later, I think we need to sharpen the long knives and kill the super-predator in our midst. If it were anything but our own economic system, we would have done it long ago.

Resources:

A History of Maine Agriculture:1604-1860 by Clarence Albert Day and A Long Deep Furrow: Three Centuries of Farming in New England by Howard S. Russell were my sources for colonial farming in Maine. The quote and statistics about lumbering in Maine come from The Interrupted Forest by Neil Rolde. 

The sugar economy of the Caribbean in the 17^th and 18^th centuries was so important to the early development of capitalism and provides so many useful insights into the present-day economy of oil that study of it is amply rewarded. Two books I recommend are Sugar and Slaves by Richard S. Dunn and From Columbus to Castro by Eric Williams. American Colonies: The Settling of North America by Alan Taylor is an outstanding general history of the Atlantic colonies that includes the Caribbean.