We recognize that many groups are actively working to develop alternative indicators for sustainability. We embark on this study to see if calibrating biocapacity may offer the kind of impact valuation for agriculture which does not exist in the market economy and its system of metrics.

Essentially, Biocapacity is the dynamic balance point between the number of organisms within a given area and the amount of resources that are needed to support them within this area. Thus, agricultural biocapacity indicates the degree to which the population of a bioregion is greater or lesser than the food that is available from the bioregion to feed it.

By combining scientific reason with place-based knowledge, culture and history, biocapacity provides a baseline for sustainability by showing how different interventions will effect different outcomes. This allows communities to develop evidence-based guidelines for organizing their own resource sufficiency while regenerating the ecology of their life-places.

Excerpts

On Bioregionalism in the Bay Area

Gradually, this eclectic group of naturalists began to call their field “bioregionalism” (bio is the Greek word for life; regere is the Latin word for a place to be managed). So, bioregionalism is essentially the idea of lifeplace — a way of extending the life of a community to the life of the biosphere through the ecological renewal of a particular area. The new bioregionalists wanted to combine local knowledge, beliefs and values with the unique characteristics of the climate and topography, the soils and plants, and the animals and habitats where they lived.

These ideas spread across the United States, but San Francisco was the epicenter for this people’s movement. They called on citizens to stop running away from the problems of industrial economy to better understand the land around them, the limits to its resources, and how this could help meet the needs of the diverse species who live there, including homo sapiens. Their vision was the development of new social and cultural relationships within the context of geographical communities.

Bioregionalism was a unique perspective for addressing major environmental challenges on a human scale. It acknowledged that solving large ecological problems by ‘thinking globally’ is much too disempowering for the average person. Although ‘acting locally’ is clearly the practical first step, it operates on too small a scale to impact environmental governance. The activities of localization simply don’t generate enough political power within small communities to stop centralized governments and markets from exploiting these decentralized life-places for their own ends.

The bioregionalists explained why there are so few decision-making organizations or networks at regional levels, where harmful ecological problems could be most effectively addressed. They showed how history and economics had prompted leaders to draw artificial local, state and national borders that seldom conformed to the ecological zones which overlap with them. Hence, natural boundaries have little correlation with our present political, economic and social boundaries and their institutions. To be sure, many ecological problems — involving personal and collective choices and action, as well as their cumulative effects on human lives — cannot be resolved within existing political jurisdictions. Ultimately, we become inhabitants separated from our own habitats.

How is cooperation over resources even possible if our geographical borders cannot be redrawn to protect and manage the environment? An engaged movement for a more ecological society cannot succeed without some kind of graphic image of the bioregional boundaries which are hidden from view. Such a map would focus on a region’s hydrology, geology and physiography, but also reflect its culture, history, present land-use patterns and climate.

From the Conclusion

Based on our research, most of the region will exceed its biocapacity to produce food for its growing population within two or three decades.

Industrial pollution, climate change, sea level rise, invasive species, water diversions and loss of wetlands are threatening enormous swaths of human habitat. Before 2050, the prodigious agricultural production of the San Francisco Bay Watershed will fail to produce sufficient quantities of agriculture for its population due to uncertain rainfall, flooded coasts and inlets, depletion of aquifers, topsoil loss, an export-led business model and a lack of cooperative dialogue among its political subdivisions.

Our study indicates that locally-produced calories have more monetary and ecological value when consumed in the same life-places where they are produced. Yet as long as the San Francisco/Oakland/Hayward MSA continues to import agriculture from elsewhere, the community will be impacted by rising food prices. Importing food into the dense population of the Bay Area will be possible until its food suppliers — foreign, domestic and regional — face their own supply limits for finite energy and raw materials and the breakdown of their own their fragile infrastructures.

When the Bay Area becomes too severe a strain on the bioregion itself, the reversal will be rapid. The external dependency on food will collapse and the capacity of the entire San Francisco Bay Watershed to sustain itself will be overtaken by extreme costs in food, water, energy and housing.

Why do we exploit our ecosystems instead of restoring them as life-places for habitation? This was the basic question raised in 1968. Now, ironically, San Francisco’s ‘back to the land’ diaspora could turn into a mass evacuation from the region as its resources continue to decline and its self-sufficiency falters. How this existential crisis is addressed in the San Francisco Bay Watershed — and in bioregions everywhere — will determine the ecological future of all life-places and our sustainability as a species. The question then will be, not how sustainable but how inhabitable is my own bioregion?

Still, if there’s any area that can break down the barriers between people and their land-place, integrating the human community with the ecological community, it’s the Bay Area — the spot where modern bioregionalism began and remains a vital part of the cultural memory. Community members are the very organisms that depend on environmental resources for support.

Now we must learn how to restore this dynamic balance. The issue is not if we have the will to do this, but how soon can it be done?

For more information, please contact James Quilligan or Patti Ellis at economicdemocracyadvocates.org

Photo by RhyoR

The post Agricultural Sustainability for Bioregionalism in the San Francisco Bay Watershed appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Earth is exceeding its ability to replenish its own resources. Each year, human beings consume our natural stocks at about 160% of their sustainable yield. Obviously, we cannot continue to use resources faster than the planet can replenish them without serious ecological and socioeconomic consequences.

Economic Democracy Advocates recognizes that the next economy will have to balance the needs of Earth’s expanding population with the shrinking level of resources which are available to everyone. This dynamic equilibrium is called carrying capacity. It is a middle path between the faster, geometric growth rates of human population, individual consumption and economic production, and the slower, arithmetic replenishment rates of water, food and fossil fuels.

Why the ‘Market Myth’ is Ending in Ecological and Social Chaos

Historical records, from the Indus Valley and Mesopotamia to early civilizations in the North and South Americas, provide numerous examples of carrying capacity practiced successfully by people in local settings over long periods. Yet, as towns developed and began to control the raw materials and labor of their countrysides, profitable strategies for resource extraction, production and trade gradually displaced the agrarian customs of living sustainably within the cycles of nature.

During the past five centuries, these same methods for social control — enclosing the commons, devising unequal trade and enforcing those restrictions through the armed might of governments — were scaled up to the global level. Following the earlier pattern, imperial centers of capital controlled the resource-  and labor-rich fringes of their rural empires through iron-handed colonialism.

The latest chapter in this saga — of enterprising groups claiming exclusive property rights over those who live and work amid nature’s capital — is harder to see, but still deeply inequitable. Everywhere now in the world, decentralized communities struggle to reclaim the social ownership and natural wealth of their commons from centralized corporations and their shareholders, who produce and trade these same commodities virtually unnoticed across vast distances.

There are no easy or familiar solutions for these non-regenerative, structural imbalances. Except for small groups of indigenous peoples, farmers and land planners from whom we still can learn, carrying capacity has never been a core part of our conventional economic system. Somehow, civilization neglected to measure the differences between the needs of an increasing population and the diminishing resources available for each person. Somewhere along the line, we forgot how to inventory and quantify our commons and plan for the long-term future.

We Are What We Measure

This is why EDA employs the metrics of carrying capacity to prevent renewable and non-renewable resources from being consumed beyond their maximum sustainable yield. The goal is for renewable resources to be harvested or used at the same rate at which they replenish themselves, and for non-renewable resources to be extracted and consumed by the present generation at a significantly slower rate to preserve these commons for future generations.

Many people today are reconsidering the self-sufficiency and sustainability of their own neighborhoods. There’s renewed interest in the re-localization of resources and avid curiosity about the democratic, cooperative management of local and regional commons. Particularly as climate change creates the possibility of extreme storms, wildfires, floods, rising sea levels, drought, crop failures and other economic uncertainties, people want to know how to make the living systems on which they depend more resilient in the face of such risks.

‘Supply and Demand’ is Not an Organic Cycle

Yet, unlike any previous era in history, when new ideas for resource management might be tested over long centuries or even millennia, humanity no longer has the luxury of time. What we know now — by comparing present water, food and energy yields with their availability for the world’s population — is stunning.

The next three or four generations represent our last chance to safeguard the Earth’s essential hydrological, nitrogen and carbon cycles from the destructive business cycles of production, trade and consumption. By the end of this century, it will be nearly impossible for the human race to transform this failed system of resource extraction and predatory exchange, and embark on an ecological path which is not plagued by economic scarcity and social unrest.

Need Measured is Need Met

This is why EDA is dedicated to both community-building and empirical research in the protection of declining resources. We’re measuring the sustainable yields of American counties and bioregions as a way to define, apportion and distribute what every person needs, and ensure that the commons are healthy and accessible for future generations.

At the same time, EDA is introducing this evidence-based framework to a broad constituency across the United States through research, education, training, advocacy and legislation. We want to see carrying capacity — the maximum number of people which can be supported by the resources available within an environment — become a practical and enduring foundation for social policy.

Please join Economic Democracy Advocates and assist us in this important work. We urge you to learn about the opportunities available and to engage according to your own level of interest. Contact the EDA Carrying Capacity Team:

Patti Ellis – [email protected]

James Quilligan – [email protected]

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