People and Place

We’ll be beta-testing the P&P journal, built on a Rails backend, over the course of the summer. The first issue will feature Brian Walker of the Resilience Alliance.

Happy to let you know when its up. Drop me a note: howard AT ecotrust DOT org.

Thanks for stopping by. People and Place will draw upon Ecotrust’s depth of experience and network of relationships to promote ideas and practices that underpin sustainable transitions at multiple scales.

People and Place: Ideas that connect us.

Talk with you soon.

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The standard criticism of organic agriculture is that it could never feed the world. Because crop yields are lower under organic systems, they require more land to grow the same amount of food.

Here’s an example from a December 2006 editorial in The Economist:

Farming is inherently bad for the environment: since humans took it up around 11,000 years ago, the result has been deforestation on a massive scale. But following the “green revolution” of the 1960s greater use of chemical fertiliser has tripled grain yields with very little increase in the area of land under cultivation. Organic methods, which rely on crop rotation, manure and compost in place of fertiliser, are far less intensive. So producing the world’s current agricultural output organically would require several times as much land as is currently cultivated. There wouldn’t be much room left for the rainforest.

As The Economist trumpets, the green revolution produced dramatic increases in grain yields in many parts of the world. Cornell University professor of ecology and agriculture David Pimentel attributes approximately 40% of the increase in yields to plant breeding and 60% to inputs of fossil-fuel energy, fertilizers and pesticides. (Science, subscription only)

But conventional farming practices have contributed to mounting ills as well - soil erosion, biodiversity loss, fossil fuel depletion, greenhouse gas emissions, offshore dead zones, groundwater pollution, farmworker poisonings, loss of local autonomy, concerns about toxic loads among eaters, and so on. By these measures, organic farming is generally considered a better alternative. And so the debate turns to the question of yields.

The latest findings come from researchers at the University of Michigan, who weigh in with a paper that compiles data from over 90 published studies on crop yields from around the world. They conclude that in developed countries, organic systems achieve about 92% of conventional production levels, and in developing countries, organic systems perform even better.

The most notable studies in favor of organics include two direct comparisons: the Rodale Institute Farming Systems Trial (studied here), which is the longest running conventional-versus-organics test in the United States, and the Rothamsted Research Classical Experiments (discussed here), which have an unbroken history of over 150 years in England. The former finds that for corn and soybeans, yields are nearly equal; the latter finds the same for wheat. On the other side of the ledger, a 21-year study of farming systems in Central Europe (Science subscription) finds that, for a variety of crops, yields averaged 20% lower under the organic system. In fact, “many long-term studies have shown a 10 to 40% organic yield deficit,” write Hudson Institute researcher Alex Avery and his colleagues (Science subscription).

Suppose organic yields are indeed lower. Does that mean, as The Economist and others assert, that more land would be required to grow the same amount of food? Not so, say the researchers of the Central European study, cited above. Responding to a letter (Science subscription) that levels this charge, they maintain that those types of bushel-to-bushel, acre-to-acre comparisons are misleading. The difference is that organic systems maintain the fertility of the land on which they are cultivated. Conventional systems, on the other hand, have experienced massive loss of arable land to erosion over the last few decades. On a constrained land base, organics will outperform conventional systems over the longer term.

Given this brief suvey of the debate, let’s look back at that statement by the venerable Economist: “Producing the world’s current agricultural output organically would require several times as much land as is currently cultivated.” Several times. Patently ridiculous.

In closing, let’s turn back to Mr. Pimental, whose authority in the calculation of soil and energy flows may be unparalleled. He’s in the midst of a debate with Mr. Avery, mentioned above:

Avery et al. imply that I reported that all U.S. and world agriculture could be grown organically without commercial nitrogen fertilizer. They are incorrect–I never said this in my review, nor have I ever said this in any of the more than 500 scientific papers that I have published. … The world has a severe food shortage problem; the World Health Organization recently reported that 3.7 billion people are malnourished. … Certainly, we need sound genetic engineering, as well as soil and water conservation, to increase the yields of our food crops and make agriculture ecologically and economically sustainable.

And so, even an even-handed analyst like Mr. Pimental is skeptical of the notion that organics could feed the world. Or is he? For if we look closer, we find that he has relied on an all too common assumption.

Mr. Pimental conflates the ecological question of growing enough food, which we’ve been examining in this post, with the problem of hunger. Those issues are related, of course. But strong arguments have been made that hunger is at least as attributable to politico-socio-economic factors – what University of Toronto professor of political science Thomas Homer-Dixon calls structural scarcity.

More to come.

People and Place is going to take a break while I work on some other projects - including the development of the full P&P website for launch this fall. Thanks to everyone who has been following along with my experiments in this medium. See you in a couple of months.

One more post to come this morning: “Feeding the world”.

Note: I’ll be retagging the existing posts as we work to develop a system of categories for the site.

Pope Benedict XVI:

Everyone can see today that humanity could destroy the foundation of its own existence, its earth, and therefore we can’t simply do whatever we want with this earth that has been entrusted to us, what seems to us in a given moment useful or promising, but we have to respect the inner laws of creation, of this earth, we have to learn these laws and obey them if we want to survive. … This obedience to the voice of the earth is more important for our future happiness than the voices of the moment, the desires of the moment. … Existence itself, our earth, speaks to us, and we have to learn to listen. More >

An extraordinary column by David Brooks last week, in which he relays his thoughts on reading Douglas Hofstadter’s new book, I Am a Strange Loop. Let’s join Mr. Brooks halfway through:

Most political and social disputes grow out of differing theories about the self, and I find Hofstadter’s social, dynamic, overlapping theory of self very congenial.

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It emphasizes how profoundly we are shaped by relationships with others, but it’s not one of those stifling, collectivist theories that puts the community above the individual.

It exposes the errors of those Ayn Rand individualists who think that success is something they achieve through their own genius and willpower.

It exposes the fallacy of the New Age narcissists who believe they can find their true, authentic self by burrowing down into their inner being. There is no self that exists before society.

It explains why it’s so hard to tackle concentrated poverty. Human beings are permeable. The habits that are common in underclass areas get inside the brains of those who grow up there and undermine long-range thinking and social trust.

It illuminates the dangers of believing that there is a universal hunger for liberty. That universal hunger may exist in the abstract, but we’re embedded creatures and the way specific individuals perceive liberty depends on context.

It lampoons political zealotry. You may be a flaming liberal in New York, but it’s likely you’d be a flaming conservative if you grew up in Wyoming.

Finally, it points toward a modern way of understanding how people fit into society. In the 19th century, Marx thought that people were organized according to their material interests and their relationship to the means of production.

In the information age, it seems fitting that we’d see people bonded by communication. It’s not exactly new to say that no man is an island. But Hofstadter is one of hundreds of scientists and scholars showing how interconnectedness actually works. What’s being described is a vast web of information — some contained in genes, some in brain structure, some in the flow of dinner conversation — that joins us to our ancestors and reminds the living of the presence of the dead.

Here’s what I’ve turned up at Technorati.

Philosophy faculty at San Diego Mesa College: “Brooks is pulling the philosophical rug out from under decades (if not centuries) of conservative thought.”

Visiting associate professor of philosophy at George Mason University: “Brooks’s understanding is as compatible with his own neoconservatism as it is with my poststructuralist pragmatism.”

Social Capital Blog: “Although the field of social identity is just starting to become a bit more hard-nosed, it has appeared clear to us that people’s sense of identity is partly informed by their social capital … and their social identity in turn also influences their social capital. ”

My own take: A courageous piece. And while the stereotypes of stifling collectivists, Ayn Rand individualists, and New Age narcissists may sound trite, that word congenial lingers.

Here are the links to, “A Partnership of Minds” (TimesSelect), and to the reprint on Behind the Times. I confess I haven’t read A Strange Loop yet. You?

(Thanks to Matthew G.)

James K. Galbraith cuts straight to the chase. “We need a replacement for neoclassical economics,” he declares in a speech to the Canadian Economics Association.

The speech celebrates the life and work of his father, the economist John K. Galbraith, and is posted as part of the TPM Cafe Book Club discussion of “Hip Heterodoxy,” which I wrote about last time.

“Critics of the neoclassical doctrines have penned, over more than a century, millions of words,” he says. “Our task now is to build the alternative. … My father’s work provides major markers of direction. Let me suggest a few key characteristics of what should follow. ”

Some pieces that caught my eye:

The micro/macro distinction … should be abolished. … We should [move] toward a unified economics of human behavior based on principles of organization and a recognition that macroeconomic forces shape personal and group response.

Empirical work should be privileged. Real science does not protect bad theory by concentrating on matters that cannot be observed. …

Our economics should teach the great thinkers, notably Smith, Marx, Keynes, Veblen and Schumpeter – and John Kenneth Galbraith. We need not reinvent the field; nor should we abandon it. Economics … is not mainly about scarcity … nor about choice. … Rather, economics is about value, distribution, growth, stabilization, evolution, and limits. The great ideas in these areas, and the history in which they were embedded, are fundamental. They should be taught, not as dogma but rather as a sequence of explorations.

Pop constructs derived from neoclassical abstractions–social capital and natural capital are current examples–are noteworthy as efforts to reconcile neoclassical ideas to real social problems. But to a degree these constructs also extend, rather than attempt to overcome, the logical defects of that system. … This is something to be wary of. …

Let’s not forget our political obligations. Our task is not only to understand economics and the world that economics attempts to describe. It is also to change it. And to do so in a spirit of abiding liberalism, generosity of spirit, openness and fair play, combined always with humor and a touch of detachment. Those are my father’s enduring traits and they should also be ours.

More >

Mainstream economics is in a muddle. That’s the story behind “Hip Heterodoxy,” a wonderfully engaging piece by Christopher Hayes that ran in The Nation last month. “It’s a Friday night in January,” relates Mr. Hayes, “and I am searching for a free drink among 9,000 economists.”

With Mr. Hayes as a guide, we get a peek behind the scenes at the Allied Social Science Associations Annual Meeting to find that a few erstwhile heterodox ideas are enjoying a certain currency. Thus the hipness in the title.

For the better part of the 20th century, the economics discipline operated under the influence of “neoclassical” assumptions. In a nutshell: Efficient allocation of resources constitutes the proper focus of study; perfectly rational and self-interested individuals maximize their economic utility; and a freely competitive economy reaches an optimal “general equilibrium.” But now, flying high on a 2002 Nobel Prize, a formerly heterodox field called behavioral economics has stormed the convention. Offering a more nuanced picture of economic decision making as mediated by social mores and institutions, it has challenged the second of the three major premises. Très hip.

This shifting of the economic terrain is more than just an intramural flap among minds that excel at outsized mathematical modeling. It’s crucially important stuff. “Ideas have consequences” runs the conservative adage. And narrowly defined economic ideas have contributed to some potentially calamitous climate consequences, just for starters.

“Hip Heterodoxy” has generated quite a bit of online discussion, thanks largely to its selection by the TPM Cafe Book Club, which gathered a roundtable of thoughtful commentators, including economists Paul Krugman and James K. Galbraith.

Mr. Krugman strikes a cautious note: “I’d like to warn against an error I think both sides tend to fall into: assuming that you have to use heterodox economics to reach conclusions critical of free markets. … It’s perfectly possible to believe in extensive market failure, demand a lot more government intervention in the economy, while still believing that [the neoclassical approach of] maximization-plus-equilibrium is a nifty way to think about lots of problems.”

The Economist blog weighs in as well - with similar criticism but a decidedly less sympathetic tone. Blasting one of the economists quoted by Mr. Hayes, they write, “This is not heterodoxy; it is a tantrum.”

My own reading of the article seeks a discussion of the heterodoxies that, unlike behavioral economics, are still out in the cold. Take the neoclassical focus on allocating scarce resources, for example. An important correction in ecological economics would insist that natural assets be distinguished from manufactured ones. “You cannot make the same house by substituting more saws for less wood,” writes ecological economist Herman Daly. Très heterodox.

Other writers have taken aim at the third neoclassical precept, the general equilibrium. Economist Frank Ackerman performs a postmortem in the paper, “Still Dead After All These Years: Interpreting the Failure of General Equilibrium Theory.” To wit: “General equilibrium is widely cited as providing the rigorous theoretical version of Adam Smith’s invisible hand. But repeated application of the most high-powered mathematics to this problem has ended in failure. If the foundation of everyone’s favorite economics story is now known to be unsound, then the profession owes the world a bit of an explanation.”

Holy heresy! As we might suspect, though, such challenges are not easily reconciled with the mainstream. Instead, a more gradual accommodation is the order of the day. In “The Death of Neoclassical Economics,” economic historian David Colander emphasizes the profession’s capacity for adaptation: “There is not much to like in current economics; but slurring it, by calling it neoclassical economics does not add to [our] understanding of the current failings. Economists today are not neoclassical according to any reasonable definition of the term. They are far more eclectic.”

And so, weaving the thread of this post back to its beginning, we might see the convention covered by Mr. Hayes, in which a handful of heterodoxies are all the rage, as a time-slice in the growing eclecticism chronicled by Mr. Colander.

Mainstream economics is, you see, in a muddle. None too soon, either – for change is needed.

More to come.

The Western meadowlark - Oregon’s state bird - is disappearing fast, reported The Oregonian last month, in a story that saw local variants all around the country.

For the Miami Herald (Florida), it was the American kestrel, black skimmer and rusty blackbird; for the Stamford Times (Connecticut), the brown thrasher, blue winged warbler and yellow breasted chat. Populations of common birds are crashing - some by as much as 80% since 1967.

The data comes from 40 years of passionate citizen science coordinated by the National Audubon Society. “All 20 birds on the national Common Birds in Decline list lost at least half their populations in just four decades,” Audubon reports.

One odd piece about the Audubon website is the “what you can do” page. Protect local habitat, promote sound agricultural policy, support sustainable forests, protect wetlands, fight global warming, combat invasive species: All crucially important issues, without a doubt. But one of the biggest threats to backyard birds doesn’t make the list - the family cat.

A 1997 paper by biologist John Coleman and University of Wisconsin professors Stanley Temple and Scott Craven estimates that Wisconsin’s free-ranging domestic cats kill 39 million birds each year. “Keep only as many pet cats as you can feed and care for,” they urge. “If at all possible, for the sake of your cat and local wildlife, keep your cat indoors.”

The most thoughtful writing I came across in connection with this story was a piece by New York Times editor Verlyn Klinkenborg.

The Audubon Society portrait of common bird species in decline is really a report on who humans are. Let me offer a proposition about Homo sapiens. We are the only species on earth capable of an ethical awareness of other species and, thus, the only species capable of happily ignoring that awareness. …

The trouble with humans is that even the smallest changes in our behavior require an epiphany. And yet compared to the fixity of other species, the narrowness of their habitats, the strictness of their diets, the precision of the niches they occupy, we are flexibility itself.

We look around us, expecting the rest of the world’s occupants to adapt to the changes that we have caused, when, in fact, we have the right to expect adaptation only from ourselves.

(Thanks to Alan Weisman for mentioning the Wisconsin bird kill studies when he was speaking in Portland the other day.)

Environmental concerns are rising in many countries around the world, according to the 2007 Pew Global Attitudes survey. “The proportion of people who view environmental degradation as a major threat to the planet has increased significantly in 20 of the 35 countries for which trends from 2002 are available,” write the report’s authors. The 47-nation survey found that concerns about the growing gap between rich and poor are also on the rise, while concerns about nuclear proliferation, AIDS and infectious diseases, and religious and ethnic hatred have each subsided somewhat since 2002.

Countries with double-digit increases in environmental concerns include Brazil (+29%), India (+17%), and the United States (+14%). Countries whose respondents cite the highest concern for the environment are South Korea (77%), China (70%), and Japan (70%).

Unfortunately, judging by the results of a Google News search, the major media have either missed or buried the story, choosing instead to focus on another important finding: the U.S. loss of prestige around the world. “U.S. seen as threat to stability,” wrote the LA Times, and “U.S. and China fall from global favor,” said MSN. Among the 163 results for a search on “Pew Global Attitudes,” only a handful mention the rising environmental concerns in their headline or lede.

Kudos to The Pew Charitable Trusts for supporting this important work. Here are the links to Pew Global and to the full report (pdf).