Introduction

E.F. Schumacher’s seminal work Small Is Beautiful (1973) champions the idea of smallness and localism as the way for meaningful interactions amongst humans and the technology they use. Technology is very important after all. As Ursula Le Guin (2004) puts it, “[t]echnology is the active human interface with the material world”. With this essay we wish to briefly tell a story, inspired by this creed, of an emerging phenomenon that goes beyond the limitations of time and space and may produce a more socially viable and radically democratic life.

We want to cast a radical geographer’s eye over “cosmolocalism”. Antipode has previously published an article by Hannes Gerhardt (2019) and an interview with Michel Bauwens (Gerhardt 2020) that have touched upon “cosmolocalism”. Cosmolocalism emerges from technology initiatives that are small-scale and oriented towards addressing local problems, but simultaneously engage with globally asynchronous collaborative production through digital commoning. We thus connect such a discussion with two ongoing grassroots developments: first, a cosmolocal response to the coronavirus pandemic; and, second, an ongoing effort of French and Greek communities of small-scale farmers, activists and researchers to address their local needs.

Cosmolocalism in a Nutshell

Τhe most important means of information production – i.e. computation, communications, electronic storage and sensors – have been distributed in the population of most advanced economies as well as in parts of the emerging ones (Benkler 2006). People with access to networked computers self-organise, collaborate, and produce digital commons of knowledge, software, and design. Initiatives such as the free encyclopedia Wikipedia and myriad free and open-source software projects have exemplified digital commoning (Benkler 2006; Gerhardt 2019, 2020; Kostakis 2018).

While the first wave of digital commoning included open knowledge projects, the second wave has been moving towards open design and manufacturing (Kostakis et al. 2018). Contrary to the conventional industrial paradigm and its economies of scale, the convergence of digital commons with local manufacturing machinery (from 3D printing and CNC milling machines to low-tech tools and crafts) has been developing commons-based economies of scope (Kostakis et al. 2018). Cosmolocalism describes the processes where the design is developed and improved as a global digital commons, while the manufacturing takes place locally, often through shared infrastructures and with local biophysical conditions in check (Bauwens et al. 2019). The physical manufacturing arrangement for cosmolocalism includes makerspaces, which are small-scale community manufacturing facilities providing access to local manufacturing technologies.

Unlike large-scale industrial manufacturing, cosmolocalism emphasizes applications that are small-scale, decentralised, resilient and locally controlled. Cosmolocal production cases such as L’Atelier Paysan (agricultural tools), Open Bionics (robotic and bionic hands), WikiHouse (buildings) or RepRap (3D printers) demonstrate how a technology project can leverage the digital commons to engage the global community in its development.

Two Cases of Cosmolocalism

While this essay was being written in March 2020, a multitude of small distributed initiatives were being mobilised to tackle the coronavirus pandemic. Individuals across the globe are coming together digitally to pool resources, design open source technological solutions for health problems, and fabricate them in local makerspaces and workshops. For example, people are experimenting with new ventilator designs and hacking existing ones, creating valves for ventilators which are out of stock, and designing and making face shields and respirators.

There are so many initiatives, in fact, that there are now attempts to aggregate and systematise the knowledge produced to avoid wasting resources on problems that have already been tackled and brainstorm new solutions collectively.[1] This unobstructed access to collaboration and co-creation allows thousands of engineers, makers, scientists and medical experts to offer their diverse insights and deliver a heretofore unseen volume of creative output. The necessary information and communication technologies were already available, but capitalism as a system did not facilitate the organisational structure required for such mass mobilisation. In response to the current crisis, an increasing number of people are working against and beyond the system.

Such initiatives can be considered as grassroots cosmolocal attempts to tackle the inability of the globalised capitalist arrangements for production and logistics to address any glitch in the system. We have been researching similar activity in various productive fields for a decade, from other medical applications, like 3D-printed prosthetic hands, to wind turbines and agricultural machines and tools (Giotitsas 2019; Kostakis et al. 2018).

The technology produced is unlike the equivalent market options or is entirely non-existent in the market. It is typically modular in design, versatile in materials, and as low-cost as possible to make reproduction easier (Kostakis 2019). Through our work we have identified a set of values present in the “technical codes” of such technology which can be distilled into the following themes: openness, sustainability and autonomy (Giotitsas 2019). It is these values that we believe lead to an alternative trajectory of technological development that assists the rise of a commons-based mode of production opposite the capitalist one. This “antipode” is made possible through the great capacity for collaboration and networking that its configuration offers.

Allow us to elaborate via an example. In the context of our research we have helped mobilise a pilot initiative in Greece that has been creating a community of farmers, designers and fabricators that helps address issues faced by the local farmers. This pilot, named Tzoumakers, has been greatly inspired by similar initiatives elsewhere, primarily by L’Atelier Paysan in France. The local community benefits from the technological prowess that the French community has achieved, which offers not only certain technological tools but also through them the commitment for regenerative agricultural practices, the communal utilisation of the tools, and an enhanced capacity to maintain and repair. At the same time, these tools are adapted to local needs and potential modifications along with local insights may be sent back to those that initially conceived them. This creates flows of knowledge and know-how but also ideas and values, whilst cultivating a sense of solidarity and conviviality.

Instead of Conclusions, a Call to Arms

We are not geographers. However, the implications of cosmolocalism for geography studies are evident. The spatial and cultural specificities of cosmolocalism need to be studied in depth. This type of study would go beyond critique and suggest a potentially unifying element for the various kindred visions that lack a structural element. The contributors (and readership) are ideally suited to the task of critically examining the cosmolocalism phenomenon and contributing to the idea of scaling-wide, in the context of an open and diverse network, instead of scaling-up.

Cosmolocal initiatives may form a global counter-power through commoning. Considering the current situation we find ourselves in as a species, where we have to haphazardly re-organise entire social structures to accommodate the appearance of a “mere” virus, not to mention climate change, it is blatantly obvious that radical change is required to tackle the massive hurdles to come. Cosmolocalism may point a way forward towards that change.

Acknowledgements

The authors acknowledge funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant no. 802512). The photos were captured by Nicolas Garnier in the Tzoumakers makerspace.

Endnote

[1] Volunteers created the following editable webpage where, at the time of writing, more than 1,500 commons-based initiatives against the ongoing pandemic have been documented: https://airtable.com/shrPm5L5I76Djdu9B/tbl6pY6HtSZvSE6rJ/viwbIjyehBIoKYYt1?blocks=bipjdZOhKwkQnH1tV (last accessed 27 March 2020)

References

Bauwens M, Kostakis V and Pazaitis A (2019) Peer to Peer: The Commons Manifesto. London: University of Westminster Press

Benkler Y (2006) The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom. New Haven: Yale University Press

Gerhardt H (2019) Engaging the non-flat world: Anarchism and the promise of a post-capitalist collaborative commons. Antipode DOI:10.1111/anti.12554

Gerhardt H (2020) A commons-based peer to peer path to post-capitalism: An interview with Michel Bauwens. AntipodeOnline.org 19 February https://antipodeonline.org/2020/02/19/interview-with-michel-bauwens/ (last accessed 27 March 2020)

Giotitsas C (2019) Open Source Agriculture: Grassroots Technology in the Digital Era. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan

Kostakis V (2018) In defense of digital commoning. Organization 25(6):812-818

Kostakis V (2019) How to reap the benefits of the “digital revolution”? Modularity and the commons. Halduskultuur: The Estonian Journal of Administrative Culture and Digital Governance 20(1):4-19

Kostakis V, Latoufis K, Liarokapis M and Bauwens M (2018) The convergence of digital commons with local manufacturing from a degrowth perspective: Two illustrative cases. Journal of Cleaner Production 197(2):1684-1693

Le Guin U K (2004) A rant about “technology”. http://www.ursulakleguinarchive.com/Note-Technology.html (last accessed 27 March 2020)

Schumacher E F (1973) Small is Beautiful: A Study of Economics As If People Mattered. New York: Harper & Row

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This article is also available in audio as part of the Green Wave podcast.

Written by Francesco Ajena

Increasingly, ‘smart farming’ has been making its way into farms across Europe and onto the political agenda. The European Union appears willing to provide a suitable environment through policies and funds which strongly facilitate the development of smart farming and data-driven business models in agriculture. In the recent CAP legislative proposal, precision agriculture and digitalisation are praised by the agricultural Commissioner Phil Hogan as a great opportunity to develop rural communities and to increase the environmental and climate mitigation impact of farmers. A new focus on Farming Advisory Systems — structures providing the training of farmers — is intended to prepare farmers to this technological leap forward.

What is smart farming (or precision agriculture)?

Smart farming, or precision agriculture, is a modern farming management concept using digital techniques to monitor and optimise agricultural production processes. For example, rather than applying the same amount of fertilisers over an entire agricultural field or feeding a large animal population with equal amounts of feed, precision agriculture helps measure specific needs and adapt feeding, fertilising, pest control or harvesting strategies accordingly. The means of precision agriculture  consist mainly of a combination of new sensor technologies, satellite navigation, positioning technology and the use of mass amounts of data to influence decision-making on farms. The aim is to save costs, reduce environmental impact and produce more food.

Without a doubt, the promise of more efficient farming, higher yields, and environmental sustainability sounds very attractive. But some might wonder how such market-oriented technologies will impact the agricultural sector. While mega-machinery, chemical input and seed lobbies push to fund these innovations through CAP money, serious questions are raised about who has access to these technologies, who controls the data and what is the environmental performance of these innovations.

Is precision agriculture the way forward to sustainability?

Smart agriculture is described by many EU policy-makers as the answer to make agriculture sustainable. While it leaves no doubt that precision agriculture performs better than conventional agriculture from an environmental point of view, there seems to be confusion about what sustainability truly is. An increasing scientific consensus emerged over the years around the fact that sustainability should encompass ecological, economic, and social aspects. Under these aspects, a brief analysis shows the limits of the impacts precision agriculture shall have on sustainability.

First of all, this new paradigm ignores ecological processes, being simply based on models for optimising conventional production and creating unintended needs. For example, optimising chemical soil fertilisation and targeting the amount of pesticides to apply in a certain area are useful tools in a context of conventional production only. Precision farming may help to reduce fertilisers and pesticide use, but it fundamentally assumes a sterile soil and impoverished biodiversity. In contrast, in a balanced agroecosystem, a living soil works as a buffer for both pest and nutrient management, meaning there is no need to resort to pesticides and fertilisers.

Farmers would be locked in hierarchically based tools and ‘technocentric’ approaches, obviously fitting to serve private profit

Secondly, smart agriculture, as currently developed, is not economically sustainable for most of the farmers. For the last 50 years mainstream agricultural development has progressed along the trajectory of ‘more is better’, imposing top-down chemical and bio-technology and energy-intensive machines. The logic of increasing production at all costs has led farms to grow and pushed farmers into debt. European farms are disappearing, being swallowed by few big farms. From 2003 to 2013, more than one in four farms disappeared from the European landscape. Along the same paradigm, digitalisation risks putting farmers in more debt and dependency. Farmers would be led to buy machines and give up their data. The collected data will then be owned and sold on by the machinery companies to farmers. These new market-oriented technologies governed by the trend of pushing to commodify and privatise knowledge would increase dependency on costly tools, mostly unaffordable for smallholder farmers, accelerating their disappearance.

Finally, the precision agriculture approach is not socially sustainable. The knowledge transfer mode of precision agriculture mainly follows a top-down procedure where innovation comes from private companies that develop and provide technological solutions. Farmers would be locked in hierarchically based tools and ‘technocentric’ approaches, obviously fitting to serve private profit, fostering a path dependency, and ignoring the potential of practice, knowledge sharing and participatory research. Moreover, the promises of digital technology and the big data agenda are mainly addressed to conventional, industrial-scale agriculture, allowing them alone to thrive at the expense of smaller ones.

A smart and truly sustainable way of doing agriculture is already here

During the last decade, agroecology has known large success, sparking transition across all the EU. Agroecology is a way of redesigning food systems to achieve true ecological, economic, and social sustainability. Through transdisciplinary, participatory, and transition-oriented research, agroeocology links together science, practice, and movements focusing on social change. While far from being an ‘agriculture of the past’, as some opponents have labelled it, agroecology combines scientific research and community-based experimentation, emphasising technology and innovation that are knowledge-intensive, low cost,and easily adaptable by small and medium-scale producers. Agroecology implies methodologies to develop a responsible innovation system that allows the technologies to respond to real user needs. It develops a systemic paradigm towards a full harmonisation with ecological processes, low external inputs,use of biodiversity, and cultivation of agricultural knowledge.

The resulting technology is as ‘smart’, ‘precise’ and performing as the one promoted by big data companies. Drip irrigation (a type of micro-irrigation), nitrogen fertilisation using mycorrhizal fungi, adaptive multi-paddock grazing systems (a management system in which livestock are regularly moved from one plot to another to avoid overgrazing), and bokashi composting (fermented organic matter) are just a few examples of advanced agroecologial technologies that correspond to the needs of adaptability, performance, and accessibility. Low-tech methods can be equally or more effective, are more appropriate for smaller or remote upland farms, and engender less debt or input dependency. The major part of equipment most of the farmers need is affordable, adaptable and easy to fix.

Are agroecology and digitalisation poles apart?

Considering the current agenda of big data and big machineries companies, yes, they are.But this does not mean digital innovations are unfit for agroecology. The main barrier to consider to the use of digital innovations in agroecology is related to their accessibility and the lack of autonomy of farmers. Agroecology is based on inclusiveness, it emphasises the importance of the dialogue between producers, researchers, and communities through participatory learning processes. A bottom-up approach, a horizontal integration, and a complete freedom of information are needed to support agroecological innovations.

Thus, opposing agroecology and digital technology would be critically wrong. Serious potential can be unlocked by combining digital tools to achieve the objectives of sustainable agricultural production. Farmer-to-farmer methods based on open-source information ruled by a horizontal exchange can be used to democratise the use of data. Crowd-sourced soil data can help farmers to share information and benefiting from it. An example of this is the app mySoil, which seeks to promote the distribution of freely available data through digital technologies. This project has developed a citizen science role for data collection, enabling users to upload their own observations about soils in their area. Sensors can help measure plant or animal needs, information can be transferred and shared among a farming community quickly, and new apps can help farmers selling their products directly and developing a more efficient community-based agriculture. The cost of specialised machines that manage sustainable soil cover and weeds, or composting, can be made affordable by promoting cooperative models and community connections among bioregions.

Agroecology is a way of redesigning food systems to achieve true ecological, economic, and social sustainability.

Examples of collaborative projects for the creation of technology solutions and innovation by farmers, such as l’Atelier Paysan in France, can be found allover Europe. These local innovations require an enabling environment that Governments are failing to provide. Atelier Paysan is a network of farmers, scientists, and researchers that have developed a bottom-up approach to innovation in order to integrate farmers’ knowledge and the development of new technologies adapted to agroecological farming. The aim is to empower farmers to take back control on technical choices. The starting point is that farmers are in the best position to respond appropriately to the challenges of agricultural development. With the support of technical facilitators and building on transdisciplinary and collective intelligence, farmers develop appropriate and adapted innovations. The technology is developed and owned by farmers, and the investment and the benefits are collective. Adapting digital technology to similar processes can spark transition in a much more effective way than obsolete top-down and technocratic approaches. If we want real innovation, we need to start daring to innovate the innovation process itself.

Involving users in the design of agro-equipments, creating financial incentives for innovative equipment purchase, sharing costs among cooperatives and farming communities, and training end-users on the high potential of these new technologies are pivotal aspects of adapting digital tools to agroecological innovation. These processes need the support of public investment to scale up. This shall be the role of the new CAP, in order to make its huge money flow legitimate. CAP money should serve inclusive innovation, in order to develop accessible and adapted knowledge. During the upcoming CAP negotiations, the future of 38 per cent of the European budget will be decided. Public money must be spent for public goods. It is not a matter of what kind of technology we want to support for our agriculture; it is a matter of who will benefit from his technology, farmers or private companies.

This article has been reprinted from the Greeneuropeanjournal you can find the original post here!

The original post included an embedded podcast that was not reposted here.

Featured image: “Rt. 539 Hay Field” by James Loesch is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

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In that sense, it is good news that feminist economics is developing and posing a radical critique of capitalism, since the economy is our metabolism; that is, our relationship with energy and matter. We cannot aspire to change society without changing this material base. However, as Amaia Pérez Orozco recognizes[2], feminist economics still lacks a clear political commitment and finds it difficult to translate its criticism into concrete economic measures that go beyond common policies to other sectors of the left.

From my point of view –which comes from systems dynamics and environmentalism rather than from feminism– one of the tools that can best help feminist economics articulate a coherent discourse is the pattern of collapse. The collapse is one of the basic patterns of growth and can be compared fairly closely with the behavior of the capitalist economy, since it reflects its tendency to expand and overexploit. Understanding this pattern is essential when it comes to defusing the collapsing drift that our society is taking and I believe that a large part of the measures that can be taken to deactivate this collapse pattern are, basically, ecofeminist measures. But, before talking about the relationship between ecofeminism and collapse, I would like to describe the collapse pattern itself.

Collapse patterns

The collapse pattern is based on the combination of three feedback loops that can be seen in the graph of Figure 1, where each arrow speaks of a cause-effect relationship between the variables it links. We speak of feedback loop when a closed chain of cause-effect relationships appears. This is popularly described as a whiting that bites its tail: a behavior that feeds itself.

In the collapse pattern, on the one hand, we have the exponential growth loop, which, in Figure 1, is represented by the blue arrows and is applied to the economy. The blue arrows go from the variable economic growth to the variable economic activity, which means that when there is more economic  growth, the economic activity is higher (as is logical); but there is also a blue arrow in the opposite direction, indicating that the greater the economic activity, the greater its growth.

This is the usual behavior of systems whose growth is a percentage of itself, as capitalist economies, since it is assumed that GDP (economic activity) must grow a per cent per year for the economy to function properly. But growing at 2% or 3% means that growth is greater every year because it is a percentage of an amount that is also greater every year.

This type of exponential growth is very unstable, because it continually accelerates and becomes explosive when time advances. The capitalist economy is especially prone to grow in this way due to some of its characteristics (credit with interest, dynamics of competition, etc.) but it is not the only system that grows in this way. The exponential growth is very common in nature, since it is the habitual behavior of the populations of living beings when they find abundant food.

However, nothing can grow infinitely in the real world because all activity needs energy and materials, and both are limited. In ecosystems, we speak of the concept of carrying capacity (called in Figure 1, Capacity of the nourishing base), which we can define as the amount of food an ecosystem can provide in a sustainable manner. If, for example, we have a herd of herbivores in a pasture, the carrying capacity would be the kilograms of grass that grow each week. If the herbivores need a smaller amount, the population will get fed and tend to grow; but, if they require a larger amount, a deficit appears that slows down the growth of the population.

This limitation creates a feedback loop that, in Figure 1, is represented in green and is called stabilization loop, because it causes economic growth to slow down when the deficit begins to be important. The combination of these two feedback loops gives rise to a pattern of S-shaped stabilization. When the population (or economic activity) is small, resources are plentiful and the population can grow very rapidly, but, as it approaches the limits, the stabilizing link slows the growth down and the population tends to a sustainable value.

However, there are systems in which the green stabilization loop does not act fast enough to achieve this smooth evolution to balance. This is due to the fact that there are delays in the relation between shortage and economic growth limitation: the system is reluctant to decrease due to inertia, blockages or delays in information. In this case, a third loop may appear: the Degradation of the nourishing base loop that we have marked in red.

Growth might continue beyond the carrying capacity, but this can only be done by deteriorating the resources that are the nourishing base. Following the example of the herd of herbivores, they could eat more grass than it grows every week, but only at the expense of eating the whole plant. For a few weeks, the population could continue to grow above the carrying capacity, but on the basis of degrading the pasture and making it no longer productive. This is the behavior we describe colloquially with the expression kill the goose that lays the golden eggs.

Overexploitation might also create a third feedback loop (the red loop in Figure 1) because it decreases the capacity of the nourishing base and, when  this happens, the shortage gets even greater and this leads to an even greater overexploitation. This third feedback loop pushes the population (or economic activity) to collapse.

The result of the combination of these three dynamics is the collapse pattern that can be seen in black in Figure 1: a rapid initial growth that reaches a maximum and falls very quickly.

Conquest vs. care

The dynamics of growth, overexploitation and collapse have accompanied human beings since the beginning of their history, since, in general, they are the ones that govern the behavior of living beings. Some human societies have been able to reach equilibrium with their environment by limiting their growth; but western culture – especially since the fifteenth century– chose another option to escape from limits: conquest.

The colonial expansion allowed European societies to grow beyond the carrying capacity of their territory, and the use of fossil fuels made possible an even greater growth. This has allowed us to live five centuries of continuous exponential growth and has made us think that this is the normal behavior. But all growth has a limit and, although many people still believe that our expansion can continue with the help of new technologies, more and more scientific studies tell us the opposite [3][4][5][6]. But the more obvious evidence that shows we have reached the limits is in the signs of overexploitation that, for years, have been detected in the main natural [7]resources: collapsed fisheries, forests, water and degraded lands, pollution and climate change, decline of fossil fuels that is not compensated by investment in renewable technologies, etc.

Given the evidence of limits, society and politicians should enforce degrowth policies that would activate the green loop of stabilization. This idea of ​​voluntary degrowth, in one way or another, has been the main message of political ecologists in recent decades, but these measures are never implemented. The, so called, “sustainable development” became a slogan empty of meaning and our consumption and impact on the planets is growing out of control. Capitalism is reluctant to degrow, guided by its inertia and its enormously powerful interests that pursue continuous economic growth.

The absence of action of the stabilization loop might cause the activation of the pernicious red loop of the Degradation of the nourishing base. Nowadays, this is not the main loop observed in global society, but if the degradation of the environment continues, it will appear soon.  It is, therefore, vital that, at this moment, environmentalism adds a very important message with a strong emphasis: we have to deactivate the degradation loop. This message adds a different nuance to the degrowth message, and I think the word that best describes it is the ecofeminist notion of care, applied, in a broad sense, to the care of everything that reproduces life on the Planet.

We can perfectly call policies of care all those that deactivate the relationship between deficit and overexploitation (what in figure 1 has been indicated with the violet arrow). The attitude of care is what inspires the traditional policies of environmental protection and leads us to manage well the territory, the soils, the forests; it is the attitude that protects the reproduction of everything that feeds us. But, at this moment, we should not limit ourselves to environmental protection policies and we should start to devise more ambitious goals that change the sign of the arrow between deficit and overexploitation. We must start talking about regeneration policies, which not only prevent the nourishing base from degrading, but make it grow. In this sense, there are already very interesting experiments in the fields of regenerative agriculture and permaculture that show that these policies are possible and achieve remarkable successes[8].

On the other hand, the notion of care applied to people is especially important at this time. There are two things that activate the red loop of degradation: ignorance and desperation. Ignorance is very dangerous, although, at the moment, it is more virtual than real –because the problem is well known, but there are many people who choose not to see it. Desperation is more worrying, because it develops in people who, despite knowing the environmental damage their actions are doing, are not able to change because they are on the edge of their physical or mental capacities, unable to choose anything other than survival.

The attitude of care is vital at this time. Only a society that cares for people and diminishes poverty will be able to prevent desperation from leading us to degrade the resources that sustain our own lives. It is also vital, on the other hand, that we know how to take care of ourselves and satisfy our needs with technologies that have very low environmental impact and, also, take care of the Earth. Only by protecting nature will we be able to sustain human life; only by taking care of human life will we be able to stop the degradation of nature.

Ecological economics and feminist economics: the issue of reproduction

The concept of nourishing base has been applied in the previous paragraphs to the ecosystems that provide us with resources or services (forests, fisheries, soils) but it can also be extended to many other things that sustain human life, including technology. In this sense, the issue of the reproduction is the key that unites feminist economics and ecological economics and can create the necessary dialogue between these two disciplines (as Yayo Herrero points out[9]).

Just as feminist economics speaks of the importance of the reproduction of human life, ecological economics speaks of the reproduction of stocks and fund-service resources[10]. Stocks and fund-service resources are those that regenerate themselves (because they come from biological systems) and their reproduction allows human beings to obtain renewable resources and energy. Much of what I have called nourishing base are basically stocks and fund-service resources. The good health of these resources implies that their reproduction will be successful and they will be a sustainable source of inputs for the human economy.

Both feminist and ecological economics are based on the idea that we need to take care of life and its reproduction. On the contrary, the capitalist economy does not pay attention to the reproduction of life, assumes that natural and human resources are infinite and will always be available. While capitalist economy does not even see that the base that sustains itself is physical, biological and limited, the ecological and feminist economy recognize the value of all the activities of care that allow this fragile base to remain alive and healthy.

A similar concept can be extended to technology and its use, for example, of materials. The recycling of many of the minerals that are essential to current technologies is negligible nowadays. The minerals are extracted from mines and, once used, they are thrown into landfills, where they are dispersed and it is practically impossible to recover them. Our technology is based on a throw-away culture: extracting from mines and dispersing in landfills and, when a mine runs out, the companies looks for another new mine or try to replace one resource with another. But this replacement has a limit, since the new mines found are worse than previous ones and replacing some minerals by others implies losing performance and efficiency.

The minerals valuable to technology should be considered part of the nourishing base that must be taken care of. They should be recycled at rates close to 100%, so that they are available for human technology for centuries. Our nourishing base, therefore, can be considered made up of many things that make our life possible and whose reproduction must be protected: ecosystems, people, technologies, minerals, families, societies, etc.

Turning the economy yin

The concepts of nourishing base and exponential growth loop have an important similarity with the Chinese concepts of yin/yang, also the loops present in the collapse pattern can be interpreted in terms of the yin/yang equilibrium of the Chinese philosophy.

What I have called the nourishing base is very similar to what Taoist philosophy would call the yin part of the society: all that nourishes, all that sustains, the apparently passive part of society but the one that possesses the force on which any action is based . The activities of care have an eminently yin character: silent, humble, often ignored, often feminized, enormously important. On the other hand, the yang concept is associated in Taoism with the expansion and is similar to the exponential growth feedback loop of Figure 1 and to the conquering tendency of the capitalist economy.

In both Taoism and System Dynamics, the notion of dynamic equilibrium is fundamental. This is a very interesting contribution to Western culture, which tends to be tempted to think in the old terms of good/bad Manichaeism, too simplistic to understand systems. Neither the yin nor the yang aspect of a society are desirable or undesirable by themselves, it is equilibrium that is desirable. When the excess of yang leads a society to expand above what its yin can sustain, the political action should try to turn society more yin, that is, prioritize nutritive actions over expansive ones.

The capitalist economy tends to enhance the yang expansive aspect at any cost. In the Spanish economic crisis of 2008, for example, from both liberal and social democratic positions, the emphasis was on reviving growth, adding more yang to an already expansive economy. Few people stopped to think if the problem was in the yin base of the economy, that was exhausted and could no longer sustain more growth.

A very interesting yin policy would have been, for example, to save energy through plans such as those proposed for energy-saving housing reform or public transportation[11]. This would have helped to mitigate unemployment and balance the trade deficit without the need to increase the export effort. Instead, the government decided to promote large public works: a policy without the slightest yin ingredient, since it consumed even more energy and not even saved the base of the construction sector but its elite.

The policies implemented by the government to overcome the crisis have focused on protecting the banks and large companies instead protecting the families and the employees: this is a very yang policy that deteriorates the basis to save the elite. Ten years away, we can affirm that the Spanish social and ecological base is still more exhausted than before the crisis, which indicates that, what they call recovery, was only a continuation of economic growth based on social overexploitation.

Another interesting aspect of the yin / yang notions is their relative or adjective nature, since there is no clear boundary between them: something is yin or yang in relation to what it is compared with. This is interesting when applied to ecofeminism and what we consider the nutritive base to protect, since the most yin aspects of society are not necessarily occupied by women (especially of developed countries).

A European urban middle-class woman who takes care of her children, for example, is doing a yin work of care, but a peasant woman who performs the same tasks would be even more yin than the urban woman, because she lives in a more forgotten and more basic sector. And it would still be more yin the work of a man from an impoverished country who extracts the minerals necessary for the electronics used by both women; and it is even more yin the invisible contribution of the crops, the cattle and the fertile land on which the feeding of all of  them is based.

This adjective character can help us when deciding what are the priorities when it comes to protecting the nourishing base of our society. If what we need is to feed the yin aspect of society, the priority should be to protect the most yin, the most basic, the things that have a more nutritious character, which, normally, will be the most silent and the most forgotten. The first priority should be the stocks and fund-resources of energy, ecosystems, minerals and soils on which people and their activities are based and from there all human activities beginning with the most humble.

 The economy of care

Western society has lived for many centuries within an expansive culture that did not need to take care of the regeneration of its nourishing base, since it always found the possibility of conquering new territories and exploiting new resources. This attitude has been possible and very profitable (at least for some individuals) while resources were abundant. For that reason, the conquering and expansive attitude, associated with the political right parties, has been associated to images of prosperity, well-being, wealth and progress. It is the attitude that we have associated with the economically sensible, with what makes the companies to have a positive balance.

On the other hand, the discourse of the left parties has been based on rights: the rights to decent work, equality or a healthy environment. These rights were something to protect even though, economically, they were seen as a hindrance, a worsening of the accounting balance, a loss of economic efficiency that had to be assumed to protect our well-being, often more spiritual than material. With this mentality, it is not strange that, in the face of the crisis, the first thing to do is to end labor rights and further exploit ecosystems, to protect the economy, which is the most urgent.

But this discourse is based on a big mistake: to associate the expansive and exploitative attitude with good economic management, without taking into account that, when the limits of growth appear, exploitation becomes over-exploitation and this is a disastrous economic strategy, even from the purely economic, selfish and material point of view.

When limits are reached, expansion is the attitude that most quickly leads to collapse. And the collapse is the worst scenario of poverty, involution and degradation, that is to say: the opposite of those ideals of progress, well-being and wealth that the right brandishes as a standard. While it is true that, in the short term, an over-exploitative policy can increase the wealth of an increasingly smaller minority at the expense of the impoverishment of majorities, this process soon finds its limits. Inequality accelerates the degradation of the social base and intensifies the collapse pattern that ends in a resounding fall for all.

In a world with four more degrees of temperature, the only human society that can be imagined are groups of Tuaregs trying to survive hell, where little benefit could be found by investment funds. In a Spain swallowed by the Sahara, neither hunting nor macro farms would achieve a positive economic balance, no matter how much they try to maximize automation or destroy natural parks. A world of degraded ecosystems and shattered societies is a world of very low energy return, where the harvest is meager and unstable and work is painful. And a low energy return means, inevitably, a low economic return, that is: very bad business. Given the limits of growth the exploitative attitude is not only morally reprehensible, it is also a very stupid attitude.

Economy of care or collapse

Only economic policies based on care and regeneration can be sensible in a limited world, since they are the only ones capable of keeping society away from collapsing and achieving a positive energy and economic balance. The left parties must be able to understand this new position in which we find ourselves at the beginning of the 21^st century and make use of all the arguments that the collapse pattern gives us to launch a message much more powerful than the current one. The policies of the right are absolutely collapsing, they are based on ideas from the past and lead us to a world located at the antipodes of the ideal of progress that they sell us.

It is time to stop associating prosperity, good economic management and well-being to attitudes that destroy the ecological and human base that feeds us. Only the attitude of care and regeneration of life is able to lead us to the horizons, always desirable, of abundance, prosperity and progress.

We need to feminize the economy because, as Alicia Puleo says[12] “The characteristics of the warrior and the hunter (hardness, emotional withdrawal …) are today a dangerous heritage.” In the 21^st  century, with a planet exploited on all four sides, we no longer have wide plateaus or vast empires to conquer and it is time to tell the new conquerors that are emerging from the far right to do the favor of staying at home and do not destroy with the hooves of their horses the few resources that we have left.

Feminism has come to stay because its message is reaching both the head and the heart of a society tired of patriarchy, wars, exploitation and destruction. That is why it is important that the feminist message evolves, as it is already doing, and does not restrict itself to the equality of rights between men and women; because that equality, in many areas, is already being achieved. It does not make a big difference for both parents share the tasks of caring for their children if the topsoil that feed them is degrading, if chemical contamination fills the body of newborns and the life of the whole family moves in a precarious pattern that makes reproduction difficult.

Let’s hope that feminist economics continues to extend its analysis far beyond the domestic sphere and is able to develop theoretical tools that allow building an economy that really puts life at the center. If something characterizes this century that begins is the deterioration of life on the planet, both human and non-human. Restoring the base that sustains and nourishes our life is essential and this can only be achieved if the idea of care becomes the central theme of that discipline that is at the base of political power and so importantly determines our lives: the economy.

[1] This lemma is becoming common in the discourse of some Spanish ecofeminsts, but does not seem to have a translation in English speaking countries https://www.ecologistasenaccion.org/?p=16371

[2] Amaia Pérez Orozco. Espacios económicos de subversión feminista. Economía Feminista, desafíos, propuestas, alianzas. Ed. Cristina Carrasco Bengoa y Carmen Díaz Corral. Entrepueblos 2017.

[3] I. Capellán-Pérez, M. Mediavilla, C. de Castro, Ó. Carpintero, L.J. Miguel, Fossil fuel depletion and socio-economic scenarios: An integrated approach, Energy. 77 (2014) 641–666. doi:10.1016/j.energy.2014.09.063.

[4] C.J. Campbell, J. Laherrère, The end of cheap oil, Sci. Am. 278 (1998) pp. 60–65.

[5] C. de Castro, M. Mediavilla, L.J. Miguel, F. Frechoso, Global solar electric potential: A review of their technical and sustainable limits, Renew. Sustain. Energy Rev. 28 (2013) 824–835. doi:10.1016/j.rser.2013.08.040.

[6] Assessing vulnerabilities and limits in the transition to renewable energies: Land requirements under 100% solar energy scenarios IñigoCapellán-Pérez, Carlos de  Castro, Iñaki Arto. Renew. Sustain. Energy Rev. 77 (2017) 760–782.  https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1364032117304720

[7] In 2017 year there was a second Scientist Warning to Humankind  signed by more than 15000 scientists.   William J. Ripple Christopher Wolf Thomas M. Newsome Mauro Galetti Mohammed Alamgir Eileen Crist Mahmoud I. Mahmoud William F. Laurance 15,364 scientist signatories from 184 countries World Scientists’ Warning to Humanity: A Second Notice. BioScience, Volume 67, Issue 12, 1 December 2017, Pages 1026–1028, https://doi.org/10.1093/biosci/bix125https://academic.oup.com/bioscience/article/67/12/1026/4605229

[8] https://regenerationinternational.org/why-regenerative-agriculture/

[9] Yayo Herrero. Economía ecológica y economía feminista: un diálogo necesario. Economía Feminista, desafíos, propuestas, alianzas.. Ed. Cristina Carrasco Bengoa y Carmen Díaz Corral. Entrepueblos 2017.

[10] La economía en evolución: Invento y configuración de la economía en los siglos XVIII y XIX y sus consecuencias actuales. José Manuel Naredo. Manuscrits : revista d’història moderna, N. 22 (2004) p. 83-117. https://ddd.uab.cat/record/4786

[11] http://www.ilo.org/integration/greenjobs/lang–en/index.htm, http://www.ilo.org/wcmsp5/groups/public/—dgreports/—dcomm/—webdev/documents/publication/wcms_098489.pdf

[12] Alicia H. Puleo. La Utopía Ecofeminista. La utopía, motor de la Historia.. Juan José Tamayo, dir., ed. Fundación Ramón Areces, 2017.

Margarita Mediavilla is a PhD in Physical Sciences from the University  of Valladolid (Spain) and associate professor of Systems Engineering and Automation in the School of Industrial Engineering. Her lines of research focus on energy and sustainability using system dynamics as the methodological tool. She belongs to the Research Group in Energy, Economy and Systems Dynamics of the University of Valladolid,  which is a multidisciplinary team of engineers, physicists, economists  and social scientists that works on the study of global energy  perspectives resulting from peak oil and other natural limits and  combines academic research with social divulgation. She is a member of Ecologistas en Acción, the main confederation of  environmental associations of Spain, and is a very active discloser of  the problems of the limits to growth, participating in all kinds of  publications and conferences in the Spanish area. Her personal blog (in  Spanish) is Habas Contadas.

Header image: Pedro Ribeiro Simões, Flickr (CC BY 2.0)

Republished from Resilience.org

The post Ecofeminism to Escape Collapse appeared first on P2P Foundation.

12.00pm, Thu 23 May 2019 – 6.00pm, Sat 3 August 2019

Arts Catalyst
74-76 Cromer Street
London
WC1H 8DR

FURTHER INFORMATION

Free, no need to book

we-are-in-this together-but-we-are-not-one-and-the-same” — Rosi Braidotti

Towards the Planetary Commons is a new exhibition investigating agency and autonomy in the face of global ecological crises. Encompassing artist film, an evolving installation and a programme of talks and workshops, the programme reflects on different ways of living and how new knowledge can emerge from struggles against current ecopolitical challenges.

Part I
Showing Marwa Arsanios: Who’s Afraid of Ideology? Part I (2017) and Who’s Afraid of Ideology? Part 2(2019)
23 May – 6 July 2019 | Preview: Wednesday 22 May, 6.30pm 

Part II 
Showing Paloma Polo: The earth of the Revolution (2019) 
11 July – 3 August 2019 | Preview: Wednesday 10 July, 6.30pm 

Neoliberal policies imposed on communities of humans and non-humans reinforce strategies of land grabbing and monoculture, threatening the land and its biodiversity. Whilst corporations and governments alike remain removed from accountability for pollution, natural resource extraction and displacement of entire communities, across the world, in regions such as the Philippines and Kurdistan, people are collectively adopting new modes of decision-making and self-governance through approaches inspired by eco-feminism, class struggle and planetary commoning practices. 

In one room of the exhibition is a rotating programme of artist films by Lebanese artist Marwa Arsanios and Spanish artist Paloma Polo, all of which are presented for the first time in the UK. 

In Who’s Afraid of Ideology? Part I (2017) Arsanios addresses forms of self-governance and knowledge production that have emerged from the autonomous women’s movement in Rojava. Shot in the mountains of Kurdistan and through recorded testimony, the film tracks the practical work of the movement – how to use an axe, how to eat fish within its biological cycles of production, when to cut down a tree for survival and when to save it. It explores how individuals come to a conscious participation in the movement; how they become part of the guerrilla, highlighting group learning as essential to the movement itself. In the film, the soundtrack of testimonies, analyses, and critical histories from those within and in proximity to the movement are edited together in a single, solid density. In Who’s Afraid of Ideology? Part 2 (2019) Arsanios focuses on the ecofeminist groups that form part of the movement, honing in on the alliance between communities of women, nature and animals and problematising the care roles ‘naturally’ assigned to women. 

The second phase in the programme, will see artist Paloma Polo’s The earth of the Revolution (2019) premiered for the first time. Emerging from Polo’s research in the Philippines, cultivated over three years, and during which time the artist located herself at the heart of the ongoing democratic struggles in the region – a struggle in which marginalised countryside communities are actively fighting for democratic and progressive transformations, emancipation and the common good – this new work offers viewers a glimpse into the political practices that underlie the revolution. Segmented into scenes, the film closely follows the guerrilla as they go about their everyday tasks, from lessons and habitual meetings, reporting and assessments to personal conversations and confidences, moments of solitude and rest. Blurring the distinctions between documentary and artist film, The earth of the Revolution seeks to expand our understanding of how revolution manifests itself in a contemporary context, reflecting on some of the positive human elements and processes that might arise from such conflicts. 

Arts Catalyst’s second space will take the form of a ‘living room,’ an evolving installation showcasing case studies that emerge from the programme, presented within the framework of a modular environment designed by artist Lorenzo Sandoval. Works by collective practice They Are Here, artists-in-residence throughout 2019, will be presented alongside Sandoval’s installation. They Are Here draw from research over the past two years into Wardian Cases, a botanical container developed in the early 19th Century to transport plants across great distances. Prototypes for New Wardian Cases (2019) are material structures modelled on non-European architectural histories that function as a form of speculative design. In the context of the public programme, They Are Here will present a live-mix of their new audio-visual work, BRUNO, an enveloping, free-ranging meditation on the relationships between ecology, migration and the urban environment. 

Towards the Planetary Commons is part of Arts Catalyst’s Test Sites programme, an ongoing co-inquiry exploring the rapid transformations in human and non-human lives caused by environmental change. Featuring works by international artists, this next phase in the project opens up the programme to broader planetary perspectives. An accompanying programme of talks, conversations and workshops will be announced soon via Arts Catalyst’s website.

Image: Paloma Polo: Still from ‘The earth of the Revolution’ (2019), courtesy the artist

Reposted from the Arts Catalyst website: https://www.artscatalyst.org/towards-planetary-commons-reimagining-infrastructures-autonomy

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Originally published on Transformative Cities

An estimated 52% of Bolivia’s population have no access to sanitation and 80% of wastewater is not treated before re-entering the environment. The Water and Sanitation for All project aimed to guarantee the right to sanitation in the San Pedro Magisterio neighbourhood by successfully building and running a wastewater treatment plant and strengthening community management of the entire water cycle through the neighbourhood’s Cooperativa de Agua San Pedro Magisterio.

Pollution in Cochabamba’s river reached such high levels in 2012 that the government declared it an “environmental disaster”. The Water and Sanitation for All project was born from a demand and a request from a community: the San Pedro Magisterio cooperative felt the need to treat domestic wastewater in its area to avoid polluting the Rocha River and the environment.

Assemblies with all cooperative members were held to discuss the technical design of the water treatment plant, improvements to domestic use of the sewerage system, and the introduction of a new tariff structure guaranteeing the system’s economic sustainability – all of which encouraged the community to take ownership of the initiative. The cooperative committed to taking on the running of the treatment plant once built, and environmental awareness activities were held in the local school.

But it was not all plain sailing. The municipality, through its water operator, attempted to sabotage the project, criticizing the technical design of the plant and refusing to issue the environmental permits required to execute the project. It also tried to divide the community.

But the community’s unity and determination overcame this, challenging the state-municipal authorities by defending their right to manage water as a community, establishing alliances (with other neighbourhoods and public servants) to resist political pressure, and strengthening their participatory and transparent internal decision-making mechanisms. The project is now responsible for treating the wastewater from 300 families, and for improvements to the hygiene and sanitary conditions in the San Pedro neighbourhood.

“The collective (community-based) management of the basic public service is certainly transformative and inspiring, and it deserves worldwide attention. It has the potential of redefining the meaning of “public” as truly commons/common goods.”

– Evaluator Lorena Zarate

Would you like to learn more about this initiative? Please contact us. Or visit fundacionabril.org/ and plataformaapc.org/

Transformative Cities’ Atlas of Utopias is being serialized on the P2P Foundation Blog. Go to TransformativeCities.org for updates.

The post Cochabamba, Bolivia: Community-led response to water pollution crisis appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Since 2001 the Mexican government has been pushing municipal governments to privatize water. If this trend continues, 35 million people will be affected and community water management – with water systems built by the people and dating back more than a hundred years in some cases – will be destroyed. SAPTEMAC is challenging this through its Water School, giving local people the tools to defend their water supply.

Mexico’s Water School came about in 2016 when SAPTEMAC representatives saw the concept at work in Colombia. With the support of national umbrella group Water For All, Water For Life – and with no major funding – professionals including lawyers, engineers, accountants, geographers and teachers have been running training sessions in different locations to give people the professional and political means to defend themselves. Topics covered include water rates, account-keeping, billing, organisation and inventories, pipes and water pumps.

So far there are 25 systems involved in the project, and water users, students and academics who have participated in the project have volunteered to strengthen the school by contributing new theoretical and political tools for use in the second round of training sessions in 2018.

Water For All, Water For Life already runs a citizens’ initiative for a General Water Law, but SAPTEMAC is now complementing this with a campaign for local water laws with the same human rights approach in 16 states around the country. The most significant result achieved to date is that colleagues from other community water systems have expressed interest in participating in the Water School project in its second round of training.

“What inspires me about this initiative is its professionalization of a collective (community-based) water management mechanism and the explicit pedagogical dimension in the work they do. The national and international linkages of this initiative are also very inspiring.”

– Evaluator Lorena Zarate

Would you like to learn more about this initiative? Please contact us.

Or visit Tecámac Saptemac’s Facebook

Transformative Cities’ Atlas of Utopias is being serialized on the P2P Foundation Blog. Go to TransformativeCities.org for updates.

The post Tecámac, Mexico: Water school equips communities to defend public water appeared first on P2P Foundation.

L’Atelier Paysan is French non profit cooperative. We started in 2009 in South of France as project with a group of organic farmers dealing with a new global appropriation of farm technology.

Based on the principle that farmers are themselves innovators, we have been collaboratively developing methods and practices to reclaim farming skills, achieve self-sufficiency and a technical sovereignty in relation to the tools and machinery used in organic farming.

Technical Sovereignty

Our goal is to make farmers imagine, and collectively create, adequate equipment and the means of production on the farm. This is in contrast to a trajectory of over-investment, over-indebtedness and over-sizing.

We believe we can make technical choices and invent sophisticated low tech solutions. We don’t want to be overwhelmed by trendy, plug-and-play and miraculous high-tech tools that will only make us more dependent, will be more intrusive and less controllable.

In 2011, we set ourselves up as a staffed organisation working to promote farm-based inventions. Our aim was to collectively develop new technological solutions adapted to small-scale farming, and to make these skills and ideas widely available through courses and educational materials.

We have also been offering resources and guidance to farmer-driven projects involving the building or renovation of agricultural buildings.

We have five trucks equipped with the machinery and materials we need to run about 80 practical training courses on farms and workshops across France per year.

More than 2.000 farmers have participated in our workshops in six years. We provide advice and guidance for small-scale farmers on agricultural tools tailored to their needs, and accompany them through the trials and tribulations of their farming journey, individually or collectively, whatever their area of production – be it no till, direct seeding, processing tools, tractor, horse or hand power.

The development of tools and self-built machinery adapted to small-scale farming is a technological, economic and cultural instrument which has been little explored within agricultural development in France, although it can provide a significant impact on the growth of organic farming and contribute to improving organic farming practices.

The P2P Foundation’s Michel Bauwens interviews Julien Reynier and Fabrice Clerc from L’Atelier Paysan

L’Atelier Paysan is a French cooperative that works with farmers to design machines and buildings adapted to the specific practices of small farm agroecology. In addition to distributing free plans on its website, L’Atelier Paysan organizes winter self-help training sessions, during which farmers train in metalworking and build tools which they can then use on their own farms. L’Atelier Paysan works to develop the technological sovereignty of farmers by helping them to become more autonomous through learning and regain knowledge and skills.

In market gardening, crops are grown on beds formed from long strips of land. Generally, little or no attention is paid to ground compaction by tractor wheels. In subsequent years, farmers will then try to grow on these tracks. The idea of permanent, “ridged” beds is to form perennial growing beds so the tractor wheels always run in the same place. Tools are needed to form these ridged beds, which allow crops to have superior moisture retention and drainage, and to warm up better in the sun.

Michel Bauwens: What was the origin of L’Atelier Paysan project?

Julien and Fabrice: The project was born in 2009 after a meeting between Joseph Templier, an organic market gardener from GAEC “Les Jardins du Temple” in Isère (south-eastern France, near the Alps), and Fabrice Clerc, then a technician with ADABio, the local organic agriculture development association. ADABio was created in 1984 to help improve practices, find resources, and share knowledge, among other things.

Joseph and his colleagues used tools on the farm that are very relevant to the soil, especially adapted to an innovative cultural technique called “permanent beds”. Many young farmers came to train in the techniques, the system and the organization of the “Jardins du Temple” and then to practice them on their own farms and projects. At the same time, Fabrice went to many farms in the Rhone Alps to collect and disseminate knowledge and agrarian know-how. Fabrice and Joseph’s idea was to widely publicise the innovative tools used on this farm, which were crafted and assembled from recovered materials and refurbished old tools. Some standardization was necessary first, in order to be able to publish plans for building the tools from parts and accessories that can be found at any hardware store.

Your approach seems very pragmatic. Yet when I read through your website, it is also a very thoughtful approach (philosophical and political). How did you move from one approach to another?

We have just put into words what is happening. A number of farmers in the Alps independently designed and built their own machines, adapted to their own needs. We have gathered and compiled all this into a guide. In the process of constructing this guide, it seemed useful to formalise our approach: first, to take an inventory of innovations on the ground, then to answer the question “what is the meaning of all this?” Why all these bottom-up innovations, which were traditionally outsourced to the equipment manufacturing industry. So, why was the farming world excluded from the design process? Whereas the farmer and the artisan of the village once built the machines needed, now farmers have disappeared from the chain of innovation.

It is not only in the agricultural sector that this has happened: it’s possible to build bridges with changes in other areas such as shared self-build community workshops, and to think about Do It Yourself from the viewpoint of human/social (re)construction. For example, in Grenoble, there are about ten woodworking workshops with available machines and tools, and self-renovation housing initiatives. They are important factors for emancipation, inclusion and social reintegration. For the last 6 or 7 years, we have been thinking a lot about these issues. We don’t want to just make machines. It is a total experience that consists of thinking about daily life and of the political approach it requires.

Current political debate reflects a very strong social demand on the ground. The guide to self-construction is the first book we published in 2012. This is the sum of the first field census of sixteen machines adapted to organic market gardening. These machines, which are low tech (in construction and design) call for a lot of craft know-how. They do not suffer in comparison with high-tech machines. Our machines are three to four times cheaper for an efficiency equal or superior to those of the trade. Why is this search for autonomy not more valued? This is a question of the technological sovereignty of farmers. It is something that is coming back into fashion, taken up by a militant farming community.

The word “farmer” was, until the 1980s, a word used to denigrate. Today, on the contrary, it means someone who is not only a cultivator of agricultural produce but part of a terroir, connected to an ecosystem and a social life. The word “farmer” relates to the invention of a specialized, segmented profession. Today they are even called “producer”, “operator”, or “Chief Operating Officer”. The logic of industrialists and economists invades agriculture.

Photos in this article come from another really interesting essay about the event les Rencontres de l’Atelier Paysan. Words (at the link) and photos (here and at the link) by Samuel Oslund of l’Atelier Paysan.

What are the current project developments?

The approach is open to the whole field of small and organic farming on a human scale. It started around organic market gardening, but now it is open to all sectors: arboriculture, breeding, viticulture… For example, we can include the re-design of livestock buildings and storage. For market gardeners who want to add some poultry farming to their production, we are also working on the issue of mobile buildings.

Depending on the demands of the farmers’ groups on the ground, our resource platform will respond to co-design the tools required for the specific practices of small and organic farmers. We want these tools to be used by conventional farmers to help them adopt a more autonomous and economical approach. It is becoming increasingly credible because it is intended to be a resource available to all farmers. Most of our users are already going through this process, but the technical principles developed, aim to ensure that conventional farmers are no longer frightened by the demanding, know-how-based, techniques of small farm agroecology.

The project started in 2009 at ADABio, a local association of organic producers, but very quickly grew to such a large scale that in 2011 a transitional association was created and then converted into a cooperative in 2014: L’Atelier Paysan. In this human adventure, meetings played a very important part. At each meeting, we took sideways steps, then small jumps and then big jumps. Today we are 11 permanent staff, quite a lot of seasonal staff as well as those who volunteer as a civic service. Everyone comes as who they are and our approach is closely linked to what each person brings. We are very attentive to the requests that come to us, and we have more and more!

What is your business model?

We operate 65% through self-financing and 35% from public funding. In our view, these are normal contributions to our effort to produce and disseminate common goods. We believe that we are in the public interest and that communities need to be involved. Unfortunately, with the reactionary right-wing coming to power in many places, this sort of support has been drastically reduced.

However, we are relatively more secure than other structures, sometimes subsidized at 80%. The 65% self-financing comes from our self-build training activity. In France there are joint vocational training funds that can cover the cost of training. We also profit from a margin on group orders for internships.

We will raise funds more and more from the public: if we want to change the agriculture / food model, the whole of society is involved. That’s why we have set up a partnership with a Citoyens Solidaire endowment fund to collect donations and the associated tax*. It is a mechanism that allows people to choose where their taxes are going. We want to make citizens aware of our work so that they can contribute to the economic independence of L’Atelier Paysan.

What is your relationship with other farmer or social movements?

L’Atelier Paysan is positioned as one of the actors in the alternative food project, an additional tool in the social and solidarity-based agricultural economy. As actors of this arena, we naturally wanted to associate ourselves with those that represent the agricultural environment, to connect, so that they might disseminate our information, our technical material and to bring together our different users. Moreover, the question of agricultural machinery was very seldom dealt with by the existing organisations.

Also, we have had an awareness-raising activity for a year now, through the InPACTassociation, which brings together about ten associations at the national level. We have been the standard-bearers for the technological sovereignty of farmers in this context, in particular to document and expose, on the one hand, the over-sizing of farming equipment production tool and, on the other hand, the publicly funded introduction of robotics and digital technology supported by the techno-scientific community.

At the international level, we are in the Via Campesina network. We participated in the 2nd Nyéléni forum on food sovereignty (in October 2016 in Romania) where we talked about agricultural equipment, saying that there can be no food independence without farmers’ technological sovereignty.

At the forum we met with Spaniards, Romanians, Austrians, Czechs and Hungarians, who were very interested in questions around farming equipment. We staged an exhibition of drawings and fact sheets that really appealed to people. It was not especially a field of exploration for these activists, and there, something happened. No one in Europe has yet set up a platform such as L’Atelier Paysan, which provides ways to document and disseminate knowledge (data sheets, self-construction training …).

We went to Quebec in January 2014 to organize the first self-build training in North America, with the CAPÉ (Coopérative d’Agriculteurs de Proximlité Écologique) and l’EPSH (École professionnelle de Saint-Hyacinthe ), around the vibroplanche (for cultivating permanent “ridged” beds). And now, they independently create self-build courses from the shared tools on our website.

In the United States, we are connected with Farm Hack, incubated and launched by Greenhorns, which itself came from a young-farmer’s coalition, the NYFC (National Young Farmers Coalition). They share tips on adapting machinery via hackathons and open-hacking camps. Though they have not yet organized any training.

We also have discussions with the Land Workers Alliance (a member of Via Campesina) in England. Two years ago they organized the first Farmhack event which we attended to present our work.

Here, a farmer can come for training and can build their own tools: it doesn’t cost much thanks to our famous training funds and group-buying of materials and accessories. Working with metal, tool use (a kind of after-sales service), sharing (using the machine and adapting it to their context in the form of versioning); this is the whole methodology that one wants to share. There is a very specific context in France, which means that a structure like ours can still rely on a large amount of public aid and shared professional funds to pay for the internships (this is not the case in the USA, for example, which has to rely on private funds).

In general, our approach is total, that is what is exciting in this adventure. We are giving ourselves the means to advance this process, between ourselves and with other actors. From a practical point of view, to reach one person is good, but to reach many takes us much further. We also consider political and economic issues, and what are the factors for acceleration and efficiency. The question of agricultural machinery is a question of political and scientific thought. On the whole, on a whole bunch of questions, there is no science-based production. On April 5th we are organizing a seminar on technological sovereignty: we have struggled to find people who have admitted incompetence. These are questions they have never faced.

What do you think of the “Commons” as a political concept?

We would like to be further advanced on this issue of the Commons. We assume that the issue of food, like drinking water, the air we breathe and biodiversity, are essential to protect. In turn, the means to achieve it (know-how, agricultural land, communal areas, techniques…) must by definition be common, since this is the survival of our species. All the know-how and the knowledge of farmers did not come ex nihilo [from nothing. Ed]: they come from sharing, putting into a common pot, shared innovation and openness. We see as a scandal any attempt to expropriate technological solutions so that they can be part of another feed-source for personal profit. This is an issue that we are exploring and trying to pay attention to.

We are alert to the legal regimes related to this issue of the Commons, to open licenses and to what could best reflect this willingness to share knowledge through which we enrich our community of users. If we use Creative Commons, we are always looking for the right license that best expresses this willingness to share.

The starting material of our work are the tools developed by Joseph: he participated very much in the emergence of these communities. But he didn’t only tinker with machines, he also thought of them with regard to a working group of farmers who wanted to adopt the innovative cultural techniques of permanent beds. His machines are designed in a collective. It is therefore the result of a whole lot of visits and picking up of knowledge and know-how from his peers. He had the talent and the energy to imagine and manufacture these machines. It is his way of contributing, like other activists.

How do you see social change? The political atmosphere is not very positive for the change we want. Do you imagine that you work in a “hostile environment”? Is there a political side to your work?

There is the question of public education. The first step of the document on the technological sovereignty of farmers will be to amalgamate the ideas of the users, the political partners, etc. Some participants in our training events do not take long to take the ideas and techniques and disseminate them.

We are also starting to have quite a lot of feedback from researchers / thinkers, who congratulate us for imagining this new way of thinking. This is our goal because we are not going to be able to produce everything: scientific studies, political thinking … What partnerships can be set up to make common the commonalities of these subjects? Additional advocates can be found at meetings. We do not have a strategy. There is nothing stronger than a groundswell to spread our way of doing things. The tidal wave will be less important, there will be no media buzz, no pretty teaser with a background of country music, but this is much more powerful. When people have experienced their ability for self-determination, there is a kind of arriving without the possibility of backtracking.

Are there projects similar to yours but which you criticize and if so, why?

We are quite distinct from the sort of ideas promoted by the likes of Open Source Ecology in the US with a beautiful trailer, to us that does not seem grounded in reality. None of the machines actually work. It is a process of innovation that comes from not involving real users. They are engineers who imagine things a bit on their own.

We are also distancing ourselves from Fablabs, which seem to be an incubator for start-ups rather than for public education. For us, a Fablab must be a place of public education and not of low-cost technological experimentation for the industry.

We are in Grenoble, the cradle of nanotechnology. Here, a Fablab is funded by industry and advanced technology. So there is Fablab after Fablab (woodworking, pedal-powered machines…), and they are generally talking about something other than the quality of what is produced. It takes funding to run a Fablab. In 2013, those who won the call for projects from the Ministry of the Digital Economy are not those who provide public education. How do we finance a general interest?

More broadly, if by Fablab we mean laboratories of open innovation and shared human resources, there are tens of thousands in France. There are ecocentres, Third-Places, associations related to self-build, others that repair bicycles, social innovation, human and economic. They are not necessarily in the high-tech field and are less publicized, but they are working on the necessary questions.

Where do you see yourself in 10 years? How do you think the world will be in which you will evolve? Do you project yourself into the “global arena” and if yes / no, why and how?

The observation is that today, in January, we do not know much about where we will be at the end of December. This has been true since the beginning of the adventure. We are in an exploratory phase, and it is very difficult to know where we will be in 3 years. After 5 years we have already exceeded our dreams of 3 or 4 years ago! Our collective dynamics explode, economically we will have to find more avenues because humanly we will not be able to go much further. We refuse work every day! One of the interesting tracks in a time-scale of 3 or 4 years is to set up our own training centre on a farm with a workshop training centre suited to our needs, a logistics platform, a classroom, offices, garages, and accommodation. Why a farm? To have our feet on the ground, a real support for our experimentation and a working tool to match our needs. Today we operate within our means, but we have ways to improve our work.

In the years to come, beyond the concerts at Rock à la Meuleuse (rock on the grinder) which we organized during our Rencontres in June 2016, we have plans to explore an illustration of our work through contemporary art.

Among the perspectives, we imagine a European network centred on technological sovereignty. In the world of development and international cooperation associations, this idea has been around since the 1970s, based on appropriate technologies: reclaiming ourselves, being more sociable, connecting and building links throughout Europe so that there are more exchanges between our different countries.

Our adventure is not without effort. Part of what helps us keep going is that we don’t miss out on poetry, pleasure and being as we are. We thoroughly, and I mean thoroughly, explore the paths and horizons that are available to us.

One of the objectives for which we believe we are on the right track is the following: while in France local development has always been specialized, today things are actually de-compartmentalized. If we think about things more “globally”, we will participate in developing something richer, more powerful and sustainable. What makes us strong is that we control the whole chain: self-building at the political and collective level.

We are full of energy: our desire is to testify that the fields we are exploring with the methodologies we use, can be applied to a whole bunch of other things.

This article was written by Michel Bauwens for the P2P foundation’s blog, where it first appeared under a Creative Commons Attribution – Share Alike 3.0 Unported License. Read the details…

All images by L’Atelier Paysan. Check out the full photo essay here.

Interview translated by William Charlton and edited by Ann Marie Utratel.

*A registered (private) donor can get a tax exemption of 66% on a donation. On a donation of €150, the donor receives a €100 rebate – the recipient gets 80% of the donation i.e. €120 http://www.citoyens-solidaires.fr/don-particulier/ for business donations (60% tax exemption) see http://www.citoyens-solidaires.fr/don-entreprise/

The post AgtechTakeback – Technical Sovereignty and L’Atelier Paysan’s Tooled up French Farmers appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Let me make the theory more palpable by relating it to aspects of the long-term project to promote transformative innovation and the transition towards a regenerative culture on the Mediterranean island of Majorca, where I live.

Clearly, even at the relatively small scale and within the defined boundaries of the island, I cannot predict — much less control — all the possible parameters that will affect whether the transition towards increased resilience, sustainability and a regenerative culture will be successful, nor can I force the speed of the transition. Yet I firmly believe that systemic interventions through processes that involve diverse stakeholders will contribute to this deeper culture change.

One useful entry point is the issue of local food production and the link between food and wellbeing, as well as food production and ecosystems health and societal resilience. I can’t control to what extent the transition towards increased local organic food production will result from the systems interventions I engage in. Yet working with unpredictability and emergence rather than against it, I can facilitate the interconnections between certain parts of the system that were previously not talking to each other. The degree of interconnection and the quality of connections (what kind of relationships are established) do affect the behaviour of complex systems and the emergent properties they exhibit.

For example, facilitating meetings between the island’s agricultural cooperatives and a large commercial kitchen that supplies hospitals, schools, business canteens and some hotels helped to initiate a dialogue about how this kitchen could include more local produce in its meal plans. This offered the kitchen and its clients an opportunity to support the local economy and will help to increase sales and eventually even the production of local foods. Since the kitchen has multiple customers, the project initiated a cascade of conversations that in many cases are the first step towards educating the people responsible for procurement about the systemic benefits of choosing regionally produced products.

A relatively small intervention can thereby affect the information flow in the wider system, via the newly facilitated connections and relationships and through the existing networks of the different stakeholders. What kind of information the system relies on crucially affects emergent behaviour. So, to stay with the example, educating farmers, hotel owners, local government, permanent residents and multipliers (like educators, academics, activists and journalists) about the potential impact of rapid increases in transport costs and food price — due to spiking oil proces, climate chaos, terrorist scenarios, food price speculation or economic crisis — will make the system as a whole more aware of its vulnerability to anything that affects cheap imports. Once these possible scenarios are — even only hypothetically — accepted, it will be easier to spread memes like the need for increased local food production and the advantages of an increased level of ‘food sovereignty’ as a risk management strategy.

Different actors in the system might pick this information up in different ways and for different reasons. Some might favour the idea of increased local self-reliance, while others might want to protect the profitability of their local tourism operations from being overly dependent on the availability of cheap imported food. Yet others might become motivated by the overall reduction in environmental impact that comes with increased local production of organic food, including the positive impact with regard to the protection of the beauty of the Majorcan countryside (which tourism also depends on). Local politicians and economists might see the multiple opportunities for generating more jobs through such a shift towards local production.

Entrepreneurial opportunities, protection of cultural heritage, local resilience building, and the link between local organic food, health and education are all additional reasons why the memes ‘let’s decrease dependence on cheap and low quality food imports’ and ‘let’s increase the production of locally generated organic food’ could spread through Majorcan society.

I cannot control exactly how people will respond to my systems interventions — or those of many others like me, but I can aim to work as a ‘bridge builder’ between different factions who previously thought that they had nothing to do and explore with each other. I can illustrate to them the potential for win-win-win solutions and systemic synergy. Once they understand this principle based on the easy ‘entry issue’ of food quality, food security and health, I can expand the learning and this ‘whole-systems thinking approach’ to other aspects of the island system.

For example, this can be done by exploring the benefits of decreased dependence on the importation of fossil and nuclear energy and the shift towards regionally produced, decentralized renewable energy. Apart from keeping the money spent on energy in the local economy and enabling Majorca to become an international example of a renewable energy and transport system, such a shift would help to diversify the local economy away from its almost exclusive dependence on tourism and generate new jobs, while protecting the beauty of the island and the integrity of its ecosystems.

In many ways, the most powerful act of transition design was simply to plant and distribute the seeds of a conversation by asking the following questions: What would a sustainable Majorca look like? How could Majorca become an internationally respected example for regional (island) transition towards a regenerative culture? Why is the current system deeply unsustainable, lacking resilience, and in danger of collapse? How can we co-create a better future for everyone living on Majorca and visiting the island?

By spreading these questions, I begin to work for positive emergence through connecting previously isolated parts of the system and affecting the quality of information in the system. Clearly, I am only one expression of an emerging culture. Some people before and many around me are also spreading their visions of a sustainable Majorca. As these people start to collaborate, we begin to live the questions together.

Education and communication are vital in any attempt to design for positive emergence. Outdated education systems and a media increasingly subservient to corporate interests propagate limited and biased perspectives of the complexity we participate in. The narrative of separation and specialization without integration engender narrow perspectives that can’t do justice to the complexity we are faced with. These valid, yet severely limited, perspectives are influencing the solutions we implement and how our behaviour changes, thereby driving what systemic properties emerge. Regenerative design solutions are informed by a participatory systems view of life that is capable of integrating multiple perspectives. One of the design interventions with the highest leverage potential for the transition towards regenerative cultures is widespread education in eco-social and systems literacy.

Another important influence on the behaviour of complex systems is the way ‘initial conditions’ (like the dominant worldview, value systems or economic system) and ‘iterations’ (the unquestioned repetition of certain systemic patterns of organization and interactions) affect the system. It is important that as ‘transition designers’ or ‘facilitators of positive emergences’ we also take a closer look at the dominant patterns that impede positive systemic change and the emergence of systemic health.

Many of these patterns have to do with established power elites, insufficient education and the dominance of the ‘narrative of separation’. Working with culture change in this way requires patience. One effect of the narrative of separation is to make individuals believe they do not have the power and influence to change the system, but the narrative of interbeing reminds us that every change at the individual level and every conversation does in fact change the system as we are not separate from it.

In my own work on Majorca, I have chosen a place to make a stand and do what I can do to contribute to positive emergence in a well-defined bioregion. Islands everywhere offer special case study opportunities for the regional transition towards a regenerative culture. Many share similar problems, for example their economies tend to be heavily dependent on tourism and their consumption tends to be largely based on imports. While there are limits to the possibilities of localizing production and consumption on an island, these limits can act as enabling constraints that challenge our imagination and drive transformative innovation. They also challenge us to think in a scale-linking, locally adapted and globally collaborative way.

Since local self-sufficiency in an interconnected world is a mirage not worth chasing, these island case studies can serve as experiments that show us how to find a balance between local production for local consumption promoting increased self-reliance and resilience, and local production of goods, services and know-how that forms an economic basis for trade, which in turn allows the import of goods that cannot be produced locally or regionally.

Before moving to the island, I spent four years living at the internationally acclaimed Findhorn Foundation ecovillage in Northern Scotland. I also worked with various transition town initiatives to understand how we can create increased sustainability and resilience as well as a deeper culture change at the community scale. In doing so, I realized that while local communities, whether rural or urban, are the scale at which the change towards a regenerative culture will be implemented most immediately, many of the systemic changes necessary require a larger (regional) scale and regional collaboration between communities.

I moved to Majorca to explore how to facilitate a scale-linked approach to transition design, by linking local communities within a regional context, and by connecting them with the support of an international network of sustainability experts and green entrepreneurs. I firmly believe that islands can serve as excellent case studies for the kind of regional transformation towards circular bio-economies that will be necessary everywhere.

…

[This is an excerpt of a subchapter from Designing Regenerative Cultures, published by Triarchy Press, 2016.]

Here is a report of a recent SDG Implementation workshop I organized and co-facilitated on Majorca.

This article reports on the recent conference on circular economy and entrepreneurship I spoke at.

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When tomorrow is just like today, boredom can result. We seek novelty. However, in this phase in human history, tomorrow will certainly not be like today. Indeed, we are in the midst of dramatic social and technological change. This includes:

1. A demographic shift in Africa such that 40% of all children worldwide by 2050 live in Africa[i] and by 2100, 39% of all adults globally will live in Africa.[ii][iii]
2. Under-population [iv]in many Western and East Asian nations,[v] creating labour shortages, and the possibility of steady-state economics.
3. The rise of new technologies such as 3d printing, drones, artificial intelligence, driverless cars dramatically increasing productivity, reducing costs, and among other impacts, recongifuring city design (why parking spaces? or why not cars as mobile homes?).
4. The likely major disruption in the global food industry through cellular agriculture – the new pure meat and pure milk and the end of the animal based food supply chain, the possibility of the narrative shift from slaughter houses to greenhouses and food labs. [vi]
5. The shift from coal based energy to solar and wind (and other alternatives) renewable systems.
6. The beginning of the rise of the peer to peer economy and possibly platform cooperativism, certainly the possibility of the uber-ifcation of energy, that is: AI, plus solar, plus energy sharing. This challenges energy hierarchy, changing consumers into prosumers and foundationally challenging energy producers – are fossil fuels the new stranded assets?[vii]
7. A likely hegemonic shift from an American centric world to a China and Asian-centric century, changing what we value, the global hierarchy of truth, knowledge, and beauty.[viii]
8. On top of that, perhaps the most profound shift is the rise of gender equity – the beginning of true diversity and inclusion

For many these changes are heralded as the beginning of a new era, the end of empire, the end of the patriarchy, the end of the coal-oil era, the end of poverty, the end of man over nature – a transition to a new era, what Sarkar has called, neohumanism. [ix] For others, these are frightening as the assets they have held – physical as in coal mines, psychic as in male domination, cultural as in Empire-first are all under threat. “They vow to make their tribe great again”[x]

For sure, in these times of transition, finding a centre to hold on to can become difficult. We feel powerless, vulnerable, lost. Our normal day way of thinking and being may not be enough. We may need super-powers to stay calm, afloat, strong, focused  during these tsunamis of change, as the futurist James Dator has written.[xi]

In my work in Futures Studies and as a student of the mystic, P.R. Sarkar, I offer the following ideas or super-powers, if you will.[xii] I have used these with dozens of nations, hundreds of international organizations, and hundreds of citizens groups throughout the world. May futurists use some or all of these powers.

We hope they help in avoiding the pitfalls and perils coming, and to create the futures you wish for.[xiii]

First, as everything changes, find a quiet time – meditation is best for this. Breathe in, breathe out. Make this a practice, such that the feeling of quietness carries throughout the day. Meditation, mindfulness, zikr, zen, or other methods that help focus on one thought – the mantra, the sound that transports one to shanti, stillness – even when hundreds of thoughts race.

Second, see the future as an asset, part of a learning and creation journey. Instead of being worried about what will happen, use the future to start to create realities you would like to see happen (within your zone of control). Insights about the changing world, what you can do, what your organization can do, to help one chart their way forward. Instead of being lost in the day to day, the litany of events, we find that by challenging one’s assumptions about reality  or double loop learning, the future is easier to create since one is watching for weak signals, watching for what works and what does not. Indeed, misleading assumptions are considered one of the leading causes of strategy failure. Often, we double down, argue even more belligerently for our view even as the data suggests otherwise, as in climate change.

Or we rush to create a list of things to do. But double loop learning is questioning our assumptions. Is the future created or given to us? Do I believe the future is bright or bleak? One large organization paid its managers to conduct a review on the changing external world – the environmental scan – and paid experts to comment on this review. However, it had no intent, as evidenced in board meetings, to change their strategy. They merely wished to inform regulators that they had done due diligence on the emerging future. They did not wish their assumptions challenged.

Third, find the used future. The used future is a practice we engage in that no longer works. For example, many institutions wish to be part of the knowledge revolution but they still engage in clock in and clock out behavior. They remain focused on the assembly line, instead of creating metrics where it is out come not time spent that truly matters. As institutions remain mired in the 19th century, workers experience fatigue, tired of surveillance, and feeling what makes them special is not being counted.

Fourth, understand which disruptions or technologies, cultural mind-set shifts, demographic changes will impact them. And, this is crucial, discern the first and second order implications of these changes. Many argue which will be the correct impact. They seek certainty in a world where the future keeps on changing. Wiser is to ascertain the alternatives. For example, with the rise of cellular agriculture, is it wiser to (1) move towards regenerative agriculture, where farmers are stewards of the land, (2) shift toward pure meat and make the land that was used for animal farming for other purposes, or (3) become a niche organic meat seller, or (4) all the above, or (5) to do nothing in the hope the new technology does not disrupt you and your industry? Instead of being focused on the right answer, the future is full of possibilities. However, without going through the implications, we often resort to defensive postures. One farming federation when presented with the possible future of lab meat becoming prevalent suggested that they needed to eliminate vegetarians and scientists. While this was done in humor, the challenge to move from “there is nothing we can do” to alternative strategies became apparent to all participants.

Fifth, we focus on scenarios, a number of possible stories about the future, instead of the right answer. These scenarios become alternative worlds that you, the organization, and the nation can inhabit. From these scenarios, options can emerge, choices can be created, and conflicts resolved since alternative  futures are now clarified. They can help develop national strategy, for example, as with the recent scenarios below of the Malaysian Ministry of Education.

(Source: https://www.nst.com.my/education/2018/04/361452/way-forward-higher-education-4ir-era.)

Sixth, the future strategy needs an enabling metaphor. Every person or organization has a narrative that underlies how they interact with the changing world. More often than not, when the external world changes, the story is left behind, and individuals live a metaphor that no longer creates the desired vision. Instead, suffering results. One global organization was looking to the future but their metaphor was an old crippled elephant. They needed to find a better story and then en-act from that story, the new future they wished for. In this case, they imagined themselves to be an octopus – intelligent, flexible, and swift to react. Individuals as well carry stories that do not work.

One CEO found that his core skills he had learned over 40 plus years were no longer useful. He described this as coming to play a game of tennis at a grass court only to find out that he was now playing on a clay court. His new narrative became someone who could play on multiple courts. For that, he needed to expand his life skills to include spiritual and emotional intelligence. However, in the long run, he realized, it was not winning (or losing) that mattered but the rally, the love of the game. Thus, a better narrative for him was that of the coach, teaching children how to play.

Seventh, and finally, and perhaps the most important superpower of all is to link the story to the system, to strategy, otherwise, the story is empty, mere words that lead to nothing.[xiv] If, for example, the octopus is the new story, then power needs to be decentralized to the tentacles, to the field. If the octopus is the new story, then there needs to be funding for emerging threats and possibilities. In the elephant story, the organization is unable to  see the future  as the organization has no systematic ways to scan for trends and weak signals. If the octopus is the new metaphor, then the organization needs to focus on outcomes, to actually become flexible. Systemic change also means that the new measurements of success are needed so that the story is not just valued but is the anchor to the desired future. Often organizations wish to move from crisis management (ambulance at the bottom of the hill) to prevention (fence at the top of the hill), however, when they do so, their budgets decline and accolades are not passed  out since they have solved problems before they occurred.  New measures of prevention are required, as for example, with the work of former deputy commissioner of Toronto Police, Peter Sloly. Elected representatives as well are hesitant since they need to be seen cutting the ribbon on new projects. Thus, new measures are required that ensure the vision – prevention, for example – is measured and rewarded.

With this final superpower, the subjective worlds of narrative and vision align with the objective worlds of systems and measurements. The future becomes real: the real becomes the future.

                      Scenarios on Adelaide Park Lands linking strategy with metaphor. David Chick.

To conclude, in times of dramatic change, we don’t simply need better maps of the changing world, we need special powers or super powers to avoid the futures we don’t want and create the futures we do. We need the super power of:

(1) Being able to stay calm and focused through meditation;

(2) We need the power to learn and reflect instead of acting from unchallenged assumptions and past behavior.

(3) We need the superpower to challenge the used future – what we have been doing but no longer works.

(4) We need the ability to understand how the world is changing, and the impacts of these disruptions on our day to day life and strategy.

(5) We need the superpower to understand and create alternative futures instead of being fixated on one view: one future. This means letting go of the train-track worldview.

(6) We need the super-power of narrative, of telling a different story about our lives. And, finally,

(7) We need to link story to systemic change, creating a virtuous cycle of change, ensuring that what we value, we count.

References

[i] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-28757054. Accessed 16 2 2019.

[ii] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-28757054. Accessed 16 2 2019.

[iii] See Sohail Inayatullah, “The Youth Bulge,” Journal of Futures Studies (Vol. 21, No. 2, December, 2016), 21-24.

[iv] See Sohail Inayatullah, “Ageing Futures: From Overpopulation to World Underpopulation,” The Australian Business Network Report (Vol. 7, No. 8, 1999), 6–10.

[v] https://theconversation.com/japan-is-not-the-only-country-worrying-about-population-decline-get-used-to-a-two-speed-world-56106. Accessed 16 2 2019.

[vi] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/china-israel-trade-deal-lab-grown-meat-veganism-vegetarianism-a7950901.html. Accessed 16 2 2019

[vii] I am indebted to the World Bank executive Richard MacGeorge for alerting me to this approach. He moves the discourse away from political interests to sunken psychic costs.

[viii] See, for example, Sohail Inayatullah, Asia 2038: ten disruptions that change everything. Tamsui, Tamkang University, 2018.

[ix] See, for example, Sid Jordan, “Era of Neohumanism,” https://gurukul.edu/newsletter/issue-38/era-of-neohumanism/.Accessed 17 2 2019. Also see, Sohail Inayatullah, Marcus Bussey, and Ivana Milojevic, eds., Neohumanisteducational futures. Tamsui, Tamkang University, 2006.

[x] See special issue on Donald Trump and the future, , the Journal of Futures Studies. (Vol. 21, No.3,  March, 2017),

[xi] James Dator, “Surfing the tsunamis of change, ” http://www.futures.hawaii.edu/publications/futures-visions/SurfingTsunamisMexico1994.pdf. Accessed 16 2 2019. Also see: Christopher Jones, “Surfing the tsunamis of change,” Journal of Futures Studies .Vol. 8, No. 2, 2013, 115-122. http://www.jfs.tku.edu.tw/18-2/S04.pdf. Accessed 16 2 2019.

[xii] See Sohail Inayatullah, Understanding Sarkar: the Indian episteme, macrohistory and transformative knowledge. Leiden, Brill,2002.

[xiii] These are drawn from, Sohail Inayatullah, What works – case studies in the practice of foresight. Tamsui, Tamkang University, 2015.

[xiv] This approach is developed in a series of books, the latest being Sohail Inayatullah and Ivana Milojevic, eds.  CLA 2.0: Transformative research in theory and practice. Tamsui, Tamkang University, 2015.

About Sohail Inayatullah

Professor Sohail Inayatullah /sə’heɪl ɪnaɪʌ’tʊla/, a political scientist, is Professor at Tamkang University, Taipei (Graduate Institute of Futures Studies); Associate, Mt. Eliza Executive Education, Melbourne Business School, and Adjunct Professor at the University of the Sunshine Coast (Faculty of Social Sciences and the Arts).

In 2015, Professor Inayatullah was awarded the first UNESCO Chair in Futures Studies. In 2010, he was awarded the Laurel award for all-time best futurist by the Shaping Tomorrow Foresight Network. In March 2011, he was awarded an honorary doctorate by Universiti Sains Malaysia, Penang. He received his doctorate from the University of Hawaii in 1990. Inayatullah has lived in Islamabad, Pakistan; Bloomington, Indiana; Flushing, New York; Geneva, Switzerland; Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia; Honolulu, Hawaii; and Brisbane and Mooloolaba, Australia.

Inayatullah is the Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Futures Studies and on the editorial boards of Futures, Prout Journal, East West Affairs, World Future Review, and Foresight. He has written more than 350 journal articles, book chapters, encyclopaedia entries and magazine editorials. His articles have been translated into a variety of languages, including Catalan, Spanish, Urdu, Hindi, Bengali, Italian, Japanese, Russian, Indonesian, Farsi, Arabic, and Mandarin. Inayatullah has also written and co-edited twenty-two books/cdroms, including: What Works: Case Studies in the Practice of Foresight; CLA 2.0: Transformative Research in Theory and Practice (2015); Questioning the Future: Methods and Tools for Organizational and Societal Transformation (2007); and, Macrohistory and Macrohistorians: Perspectives on Individual, Social, and Civilizational Change (1997). His latest (2018) book is Asia 2038: Ten Disruptions That Change Everything.

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“78 Reasonable Questions to Ask about Any Technology” is from the book “Turning Away from Technology” by Stephanie Mills and originally derived from 76 questions that were written by Jacques Ellul.
A great video commentary by Jacques Ellul called “The Betrayal by Technology” can be found here.

A print version (PDF) of these questions can be found here.

Ecological

• What are its effects on the health of the planet and of the person?
• Does it preserve or destroy biodiversity?
• Does it preserve or reduce ecosystem integrity?
• What are its effects on the land?
• What are its effects on wildlife?
• How much and what kind of waste does it generate?
• Does it incorporate the principles of ecological design?
• Does it break the bond of renewal between humans and nature?
• Does it preserve or reduce cultural biodiversity?
• What is the totality of its effects, it’s “ecology”?

Social

• Does it serve community?
• Does it empower community members?
• How does it affect our perception of our needs?
• Is it consistent with the creation of a communal, human economy?
• What are its effects on relationships?
• Does it undermine conviviality?
• Does it undermine traditional forms of community?
• How does it affect our way of sensing and experiencing the world?
• Does it foster a diversity of forms of knowledge?
• Does it build on, or contribute to, the renewal of traditional forms of knowledge?
• Does it serve to commodify knowledge or relationships?
• To what extent does it redefine reality?
• Does it raise a sense of time and history?
• What is its potential to become addictive?

Moral

• What values does its use foster?
• What is gained by its use?
• What are its effects beyond its ability to the individual?
• What is lost in using it?
• What are its effects on the least person in the society?

Aesthetic

• Is it ugly?
• Does it cause ugliness?
• What noise does it make?
• What pace does it set?
• How does it affect quality of life (as distinct from standard of living)?

Practical

• What does it make?
• Who does it benefit?
• What is its purpose?
• Where was it produced?
• Where is it used?
• Where must it go when it’s broken or obsolete?
• How expensive is it?
• Can it be repaired? By an ordinary person?
• What is the entirety of its cost, the full cost accounting?

Ethical

• How complicated is it?
• What does it allow us to ignore?
• To what extent does it distance us from effect?
• Can we assume personal, or communal, responsibility for its effects?
• Can its effects be directly apprehended?
• What ancillary technologies does it require?
• What behavior might it make possible in the future?
• What other technologies might it make possible?
• Does it alter our sense of time and relationships in ways conducive to nihilism?

Vocational

• What is its impact on craft?
• Does it reduce, deaden, or enhance human creativity?
• Is it the least imposing technology available for the task?
• Does it replace, or does it aid, human hands and human beings?
• Can it be responsive to organic circumstance?
• Does it depress or enhance the quality of goods?
• Does it depress or enhance the meaning of work?

Political

• What is its mystique?
• Does it concentrate or equalize power?
• Does it require, or institute, a knowledge elite?
• Is it totalitarian?
• Does it require a bureaucracy for its perpetuation?
• What legal empowerments does it require?
• Does it undermine traditional moral authority?
• Does it require military defense?
• Does it enhance, or serve, military purposes?
• How does it affect warfare?
• Does it foster a mass thinking or behavior?
• Is it consistent with the creation of global economy?
• Does it empower transnational corporations?
• What kind of capital does it require?

Metaphysical

• What aspect of the inner self does it reflect?
• Does it express love?
• Does it express rage?
• What aspect of our past does it reflect?
• Does it reflect cynical or linear thinking?

Photo by kleuske

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