A wise, wise man

I've just listened to an edition of Scott Mann's The Permaculture Podcast where he interviews David Holmgren.

It reminds me that, only 100 km from Moora Farm, there lives a man of transcendent creativity and wisdom.  I have met the man, been to his property Melliodora, and have a number of his books.  His Permaculture: Principle and Pathways beyond Sustainability is as precious a book as I own.  You can buy it from his site.

During the podcast Holmgren talks about some important things - including his justification (?) for being a 'practitioner' as well as a theorist / teacher.  The further I go on life's journey, the more sure I am that what we do is so much more important than what we say.

He also talked about the limitations of reductionist science - in his quiet, wise way.  It seems to me that scientific triumphalism is one of the errors of our age - possibly exceeded in cost only by the practical chaos that results from treating economics as a science - rather than the dangerously narrow philosophical speculation that it is.

Anyway - enough pontificating for one morning!  I need to do something practical.  

Bush fires

I've been looking at submissions to the Bushfires Royal Commission.

There is one from the Australian Forest Growers that makes a lot of sense. The person who wrote it is measured and careful, but the recipe for disaster comes through:

Psuedo science + Politics + Bureaucratic caution = Disaster

This recipe for disaster afflicts us in multiple spheres. To avoid the charge that I'm either right wing - or left wing - let me use three examples side by side (and try to offend everyone equally).

Example disasters
Victorian bushfires	Industrial food	Global financial crisis
Underlying ‘pseudo’ science
Environmental sciences	High input, industrial agriculture	Modern finance and risk management theory
Politics
The green vote	Cheap food	Too big to fail
Bureaucratic failure
Inaction on fuel reduction	Skewing of the regulatory system in favour of industrial food	Deregulation and self regulation of financial sector
Result
Fuel build-up leading to catastrophic fires	Local food systems are disadvantaged by an excess of caution while industrial food systems are subsidised and their externalities socialised	The profits of excessive risk taking are ‘earned’ by the finance sector – while the inevitable losses are socialised

In each case there are alternatives to the psuedo science that has come to dominate the politics - but we've exercised our democratic choices or allowed stakeholder manipulation of our democratic choices - to the point of disaster. Bureaucrats follow the politics - as, to a degree, they must.

In each case the system turns out to be more complex than we though - ahhh - complex systems again.

Complex systems

I've been becoming more and more interested in complex systems theory. According to Wikipedia:

A complex system is any system featuring a large number of interacting components, whose aggregate activity is non-linear and typically exhibits self-organization under selective pressures.

It seems to me that both economies and farms are best understood as complex adaptive systems. I have always understood this on an intuitive, common sense level. Complex systems theory puts an intellectual framework around it.

One of my Dad's favourite aphorisms (perhaps just when he was arguing something with me) was 'beware of people who give simple answers to complicated questions'. I would like to think I've spent a good part of my life since I left the farm trying to avoid the tendency we all have to look for 'simple answers'.

I've recently come across someone who is is using complexity theory to explain the wet rice agriculture systems on the island of Bali. His name is Prof. Stephen Lansing - and he is very special!

I first found him via a podcast you can find on this page. The lecture was given in February 2006 - so it's well down the page. You can just search for Lansing or Bali.

From there, I found a book he has written called Perfect Order: Recognizing Complexity in Bali. So far I've only managed to read part of the first chapter on Amazon, but it's very good.

There is also an interview with him on YouTube called Cycle of Rice, Cycle of Life.

Another favourite author / thinker of mine is Nicholas Nassim Taleb. He is a trenchant critic of mainstream capital markets theory. His best book is The Black Swan. The following is a quote from his website:

What I do: I am interested in how to live in a world we don’t understand very well –in other words, while most human thought (particularly since the enlightenment) has focused us on how to turn knowledge into decisions, I am interested in how to turn lack of information, lack of understanding, and lack of “knowledge” into decisions –how not to be a “turkey”. My last book The Black Swan (and the 4th Quadrant papers) drew a map of what we don’t understand; my current work focuses on how to domesticate the unknown "what to do in a world we don't understand".

I find myself wondering what my own response to the challenges presented by Lansing and Taleb ought to be?