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> they propose tearing it down, because they don’t see the use of it. Speaking for just myself, it isn't as if I don't know the various points outline in the b

by hosh 6y ago

> they propose tearing it down, because they don’t see the use of it. Speaking for just myself, it isn't as if I don't know the various points outline in the basics. It is that my current thinking is that the extractive-value paradigm of the industrial processes has done far more harm than good. Both people and land have been turned into resources by which value is extracted and capitalized. This has lead to a wide-spread devastation in our ecology, in our communities, and our human potential. It's a process that is moving towards degeneration, and we see many of those effects -- from growing equality gaps, to the radicalization of angry young people, and so forth. Although I feel an antipathy towards all of this (in the sense of watching a dumpster fire), I have encountered some work that does not involving burning anything down (literally or metaphorically). It does require a change in paradigm and epistemology. The work I am referring to comes from Carol Sandford. I'm still learning it and slowly applying them in my life. She has been at it for over 40 years now, and have worked with Fortune 500 companies ... though I don't know how much of a transformative effect she has. Nothing that made the news in a big way. But take the idea of having to use synthetic fertilizers and pest control. There are better ways, but they eat at the profit margin if you were only to maximize on profit, yield, and market value. If the goal, however, is towards the well-being of the community and the land in which things are farmed, then there are many methods with which we can accomplish that while still feeding people without requiring a huge amount of labor. But it comes from a different way of seeing the world.

bearer_token 6y ago
> There are better ways, but they eat at the profit margin if you were only to maximize on profit, yield, and market value. If the goal, however, is towards the well-being of the community and the land in which things are farmed, then there are many methods with which we can accomplish that while still feeding people without requiring a huge amount of labor. But it comes from a different way of seeing the world. These goals are compatible. They require a government body, representing the well-being of the community, willing to tax externalities and use the funds to invest in revitalization. However, expecting government to be economically responsible is about as likely as expecting profit-maximizing corporate entities to be socially responsible.
- hosh 6y ago
  Those better ways I mentioned do not require a government body, or use of tax externalities. A lot of the exciting things in permaculture are coming from people putting things into practice first and then lobbying for those results. Permaculture has a lot of design principles and practices that can be deployed in a decentralized way. They do not require collective action or policy-making at a large scale. Ordinary people can make enough impact in their local ecology and community, and they can do it in a way that makes sense for their locality that may not make sense elsewhere. Furthermore, using Carol Sandford's method of deconstructing a frame, "requiring a government body" like you are talking about are: 1. The paradigm of behavioralism (rewards and incentives) 2. The idea that change requires heroic effort (something outside of you, such as the government, to make large scale changes) 3. Regulating these actions are a type of"Do Less Harm" or perhaps "Do More Good" paradigms. Those are reactions to "Value Extraction", and they don't really work, not enough to solve the fundamental problems of Value Extraction.
  - kortilla 6y ago
    > Those better ways I mentioned do not require a government body, or use of tax externalities. They do if the profit margins are meaningfully lower. All it takes is a few actors to ignore costs that have no financial incentive to outgrow and overtake all of the competitors. Behaving better on your own is nice, but that’s not a societal solution because people throw away a lot of unnecessary niceties when the going gets tough. A majority of the population wants to stop climate change but the lack of a carbon tax means people still burn massive amounts of fuel and pay nothing to offset it. Instead we are taking this path of carbon-shaming and “do your best to reduce emissions” and it’s failing spectacularly. Without pricing externalities, you end up with assholes flying on private jets thousands of miles to give a talk on the importance of dealing with climate change without ever even offsetting their own footprint. People are consistently too stupid and too selfish across all populations to A) have even a rough grasp of their inputs/outputs from/to the environment and B) to make meaningful sacrifices if it actually requires a significant change in lifestyle. Just look how many people still buy gas cars that cost as much as electric cars because of “range anxiety”. Carol Sandford’s methods are likely not having any meaningful impact because they ignore the hard realities of economics. Behaviors need incentives and not using the government to implement those incentives through taxation/credits/fines just means trying to do it through social pressure. Social pressure is slow and ineffective at scale.
Robotbeat 6y ago
So, I don't know that profit, extractive-value, market-value, capitalizing are really the right frame, here. Alternative systems like the Soviet Union had similar paradigms without necessarily relying on profit. These industrial processes are necessary for addressing quality of life (including quantity of labor required, lenghth of working day required, etc) regardless of whether that system is profit-seeking or not. The Soviet Union had cars, fertilizer, pesticides, plastic, lots of oil and gas, antibiotics, vaccines, sanitation, and appliances for the same reason they're profitable in the West: it actually helps people's quality of life. That's why the essay is framed in terms of industry, not economic systems. Because that's somewhat orthogonal. (And I do think Chesterton's Fence would be a valuable point, here, too... Money and profit are tools for understanding and facilitating the efficiency of different activities, and to me the negative conditions of capitalism are a side effect of the efficiency it facilitates. If we're going to replace profit with something else, we must address how we're going to establish similar efficiencies. IMHO, a more established path than tearing down capitalism entirely would be to keep capitalism and profit, but just redistribute and rebalance, i.e. cut off the ends of the distribution to keep things from going crazy and eating itself.)
- hosh 6y ago
  EDIT: I reread the comment above and realized I did not adequately address it and I had misunderstood some of what the commenter was saying. I revised my answer below: I disagree that we necessarily need to have synthetic fertalizers, pest control, etc. There are a number of methods from permaculture that does not require synthetic fertilizers, weed killers, and pest killers. The whole site is analyzed together and designed in a way there there is a cycling of nutrients back into the soil, or amendments such as biochar or mycological growth help with that. (Synthetic fertilizers actually deplete soil fertility in the long run, so you have to keep adding more and more with every cycle). Interplanting, plant guilds, and "integrated pest control" (chickens, duck, goats, and developing habitat for the pest's natural predators). The maximum yield may be lower, but designing a site this way accomplishes two things. First, it is far more resilient than the industrial agricultural method. Second, it puts fertility back into the land faster than it uses it up, and as such, it has the potential to restore the ecology. These are things people are already putting into practice around the world. Furthermore, what the Soviet Union had was still essentially value-extraction. That value was distributed in a different way, but it is still value-extraction. It is still stuck in the same paradigm, and arguably worse -- too rigid, too unable to adapt to changing conditions. A regenerative paradigm does not put profit first, but it doesn't necessarily dispense with it either. (In the permaculture community, that is the third permaculture ethic: Fair Share). It is as decentralized as a free-market, but is not centralized like the way capitalization tends towards aggregation of resources. One key difference between a regenerative paradigm and the value-extraction: Free-market is driven from profit motive, the selfish actor. Regenerative living is driven by individual's own sense of what value they can contribute to the greater whole, and developing their own personal capabilities in order to accomplish it. So one is a value extraction and the other is a value generation or value adding (not to be confused with "value-added", which is something from the value-extraction paradigm). Even if we were to say, ok, this regenerative paradigm works, and let's shift to that, it is not something that can be done through policy changes.
loupeabody 6y ago
Extremely glad to see your measured response to this article. Seeing the tacit approval of synthetic fertilizers in the article made me reel. It's a shame that farming methods like permaculture aren't a part of this conversation by default. For the reason they're not often discussed, I defer to your conclusion about needing to adopt a new perceptual framework and value system to effect certain kinds of change. It's been several years since we last spoke Hosh, so I was very pleasantly surprised to find myself agreeing with your comment here. Hope you and your family are well!
- hosh 6y ago
  Hey man, glad to see you about! Hope things are going well. Send me some email sometime and let's catch up.
- roel_v 6y ago
  Have you actually done any permaculture, and/or run the numbers on what it would take to move away from synthetic fertilizers? The reason permaculture isn't part of the default is because it's a pipe dream. A hobby for those interested in it, but not a real, scalable alternative for what we have now.
  - sjy 6y ago
    I just asked for some pro-permaculture sources in this comment [1], and would appreciate it if you could also point me in the direction of some further reading on the claim that permaculture is a pipe dream. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24648887 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24648887
    - adrianN 6y ago
      Organic agriculture has much lower yields than conventional agriculture for most crops [1]. I believe permaculture is more restrictive than US-Organic. It would take some big changes in our diet to absorb such a loss in productivity. [1] https://geneticliteracyproject.org/2018/02/16/usda-data-confirm-organic-yields-dramatically-lower-conventional-farming/ https://geneticliteracyproject.org/2018/02/16/usda-data-conf...
TeeMassive 6y ago
> Both people and land have been turned into resources by which value is extracted and capitalized. This has lead to a wide-spread devastation in our ecology, in our communities, and our human potential. It's a process that is moving towards degeneration, and we see many of those effects -- from growing equality gaps, to the radicalization of angry young people, and so forth. The problem with this kind of points of view like this one is that it never considers that the population are consumers too and are motivated to work and "extract capital" from themselves for themselves. Once those who promote those ideas move from opposition to those who occupied it they are confronted to the exact same problems to solve but without the "evil" solutions.
- hosh 6y ago
  > The problem with every this kind of points of view like this one is that it never considers that the population are consumers too and are motivated to work and "extract capital" from themselves for themselves. Unless you are working for yourself, you're not really "extracting capital" from yourself. There was an article I recently read here on HN about negotiating salary as an engineer. I have been leaving a lot of money on the table. Depending on who you work for, the corporate organizations don't really care who you are. If you are able to frame your work in terms of how much revenue you can generate for them, you can negotiate terms that are much more favorable to you. > Once those who promote those ideas move from opposition to those who occupied it they are confronted to the exact same problems to solve but without the "evil" solutions. I have written elsewhere about a different way of viewing it. There are people who see "Value Extraction" and go on to "Do Less Harm" or "Do More Good", but those do not fundamentally address the problems with "Value Extraction". One of the things that shift it completely out of value extraction is to invert it. Rather than being a consumer of value and regulated by extrinsic motivation, you as an individual find your intrinsic motivation to contribute meaningful value to the world.
  - kortilla 6y ago
    > Unless you are working for yourself, you're not really "extracting capital" from yourself. You are selling programming as a service to a company. That’s extracting capital in the same way that the company will when they sell a SaaS or even directly resell your programming.
schoen 6y ago
> But take the idea of having to use synthetic fertilizers and pest control. The corresponding "industrial literacy" element is the statistic that half of the nitrogen in human bodies in the world was fixed from the atmosphere through the Haber-Bosch process. That doesn't mean that we should assume that there's no other way to get nitrogen fixation, but I imagine it means we should realize that changing that in order to do without synthetic fertilizers, or even reduce the use of them dramatically, is a really, really big undertaking. (I've been vegan or vegetarian for the past 80% of my life, but my carbon footprint is still way above the global average because of my heavy use of airplanes. Well, not this year, maybe. Anyway, one way I notice that I'm lacking in industrial literacy in the sense of this article: I honestly don't know whether my diet puts me above or below the world average in ratio of Haber-Bosch-fixed nitrogen in my body! I think noticing my uncertainty about that makes me more sympathetic to the idea of the original article, though.)
- baybal2 6y ago
  > The corresponding "industrial literacy" element is the statistic that half of the nitrogen in human bodies in the world was fixed from the atmosphere through the Haber-Bosch process. That doesn't mean that we should assume that there's no other way to get nitrogen fixation, but I imagine it means we should realize that changing that in order to do without synthetic fertilizers, or even reduce the use of them dramatically, is a really, really big undertaking. Some years ago, I read an American defence analyst claiming that USA is just 4 biggest fertilizer stockpiles away from starvation, if no imports are possible. And the globe as well is dangerously reliant on a dozen of so "megaplants."
  - schoen 6y ago
    I also think this understanding of vulnerability is a benefit of industrial literacy.
CryptoPunk 6y ago
>>It is that my current thinking is that the extractive-value paradigm of the industrial processes has done far more harm than good. Not for humanity. The rate of extreme poverty has declined at its fastest in human history over the last 30 years. I don't know if you've ever had close contact with people living at or close to extreme poverty. It's hard for me to imagine anyone having such a familiarity, and not believing industrial civilization has done more good than harm, at least when measured in terms of the quality of life of people.
- jahaja 6y ago
  To nuance this once again by Jason Hickel: "If we use $7.40 per day, we see a decline in the proportion of people living in poverty, but it’s not nearly as dramatic as your rosy narrative would have it. In 1981 a staggering 71% lived in poverty. Today it hovers at 58% (for 2013, the most recent data). Suddenly your grand story of progress seems tepid, mediocre, and – in a world that’s as fabulously rich as ours – completely obscene. There is nothing worth celebrating about a world where inequality is so extreme that 58% of people are in poverty, while a few dozen billionaires have more than all of their wealth combined."
  - CryptoPunk 6y ago
    He says the rate of progress seems tepid. But tepid compared to what? This has been the fastest reduction in the poverty rate in human history. And this reduction in the poverty rate has occurred amidst a massive population explosion, unlike say the 14th century's poverty decline, which happened as 1/3rd of the population died from the Black Death, which raised the area of arable land per capita. Also, to nuance your nuance, Hickel cites just the poverty rate. The rate of extreme poverty has dropped much more drastically: "The World Bank Group’s goals are to end extreme poverty and promote shared prosperity. This mission underpins all of our analytical, operational, and convening work in more than 145 client countries. There has been marked progress on reducing poverty – the first of the world’s Sustainable Development Goals – over the past decades. According to the most recent estimates, in 2015, 10 percent of the world’s population or 734 million people lived on less than $1.90 a day. That’s down from nearly 36 percent or 1.9 billion people in 1990." No, the cynical outlook has no legs to stand on. Humanity is succeeding magnificently at improving its own condition, according to all direct indicators and historical standards. My only major concern is the damage industrial civilization is doing to the larger ecosystem, as thousands of species are driven to extinction as human settlements and farms engulfs their natural habitats.
sjy 6y ago
You seem like a smart person who writes well, and I’ve met a few such people with an interest in permaculture. What do you think about the claims that it’s pseudoscientific, and prescribes agricultural methods that couldn’t possibly feed the current global population? I’m not advancing these claims myself – I know very little about permaculture – but I have done a few searches to try to learn more and I’m really put off by the lack of a clear definition and the conspiratorial, anti-science views that many proponents of the concept (philosophy? theory? movement?) seem to express. I’m also thoroughly confused by the relationship between permaculture and agroecology, which seems like another word for the same thing to me. I found an article in a permaculture publication [1] which acknowledges unscientific thinking as a major problem for permaculture, while defending the concept as something to be promoted and advanced in a scientific way. I’d be interested in reading more work like this, or preferably, something published in a mainstream science journal which permaculture advocates like you accept as fair comment. The author of the article I’ve mentioned seems to dismiss my preference for those sources as “fetishizing the outputs of big-money science” – do you agree with that? [1] http://liberationecology.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/Ferguson.PeoplesScience.PrePrint.pdf http://liberationecology.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/Ferg...
- maranud 6y ago
  This might be worth looking into: https://www.fermedubec.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/ENGLISH-viability_organic_market_garden_without_motorization_paper.pdf https://www.fermedubec.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/ENGLIS... The final version can be requested here: https://www.pubhort.org/actahort/books/1137/1137_47.htm https://www.pubhort.org/actahort/books/1137/1137_47.htm
- tastyfreeze 6y ago
  I've been studying permaculture/regenerative agriculture for a couple years. I think part of the problem is that you will find a broad spectrum of practitioners. From hobbyists, that just apply a practice because somebody else had success with it. To professionals, like Joel Salatin and Richard Perkins, that record everything, perform experiments, and improve process. The professionals are less Mollison style permaculture design and more regenerative agriculture. The basic idea is the same. Work with nature instead of against. Permaculture as a hobby is just another school of gardening with an eye to efficiency and permanence. You will find as many opinions of the "best" way as there are people. It doesn't help that some practices are very specific to local climate. Papers on soil microbiome and rhizosphere interactions are the basis of regenerative agriculture practices. If you want to understand how these practices can feed the world I would start there. PS Now that I have written this, I realize it doesn't really address your criticism. Look towards regenerative agriculture to feed the world over permaculture. While permaculture can be applied at large scale it is more of a homestead practice of planning your land use for efficiency of your own food production. Agroecology and agroforestry are terms for building ecosystems that provide agricultural output. Something like a nut tree forest with berry understory and mushroom production on rotting logs with farm animals roaming about. An agricultural plot planned to perform as an ecosystem with as many niches producing output as possible.
roenxi 6y ago
> But take the idea of having to use synthetic fertilizers and pest control. There are better ways, but they eat at the profit margin if you were only to maximize on profit, yield, and market value. Society relies on their being massive agricultural surplus so that only a few people need to be farmers and the rest of us can go and do other things. If farm yields drop, more land (and people) need to be farmers. If profit margins shrink from changes in farming technique, then either either less is being produced (again, requiring more land & farmers) or more resources being consumed (requiring more raw materials being diverted away from producing comfort and towards producing food). Profits and yields are not small matters, they are ratios in the equation of how many people we free up from being farmers. We have made enormous strides by freeing up people from toiling away as farmers. There is a long debate to be had about whether taking steps to wind that back is a good idea.
- crispyambulance 6y ago
  > There is a long debate to be had about whether taking steps to wind that back is a good idea. It depends on what you exactly mean by "winding that back". Putting ecological and global warming concerns on the table-of-consideration along with market imperatives is not only reasonable but responsible. Ironically, the best example of profit/yield imperatives above all else is the corn/fructose industry. This industry is heavily subsidized because of decades of political finagling. They're bad for the environment and not really profitable without subsidies. The corn industry has "won" the race to the bottom and maximized yield at the expense of everything else. Supply chain technologies are now starting to enable small farmers to provide sustainable goods and still make a living without being a cog in a huge corporation. Suppliers are increasingly doing that. Is it going to completely replace the corn/fructose industry? no, but it can move us in the right direction over time.
- catawbasam 6y ago
  You seem to believe fewer farmers is better. There are people out who would like to be farmers but can't pull it off because the current system makes it hard to start small and build up.
  - 6y ago
Mvandenbergh 6y ago
>It is that my current thinking is that the extractive-value paradigm of the industrial processes has done far more harm than good. Both people and land have been turned into resources by which value is extracted and capitalized. Before industrial society, people and land were also resources from which value was extracted, often quite literally belonging to a small group of people. I don't think that a purely extractive-value paradigm is the only way for an industrial society to run. For example, if we better priced the harm that comes from things like fertiliser run-off and emissions from fertiliser manufacturing, would we still use synthetic fertilisers? Almost definitely yes, we would just be more careful about using it only where really required. >It's a process that is moving towards degeneration, and we see many of those effects -- from growing equality gaps, to the radicalization of angry young people, and so forth. I think we need to be quite careful with our history here. The systems that were replaced by the early modern civilisation and then subsequently by industrial civilisation, were much more deeply unequal than our modern system, at least in NW Europe which is the history I know best. Those systems, often not quite accurately described as "feudalism" were much more sustainable but also not very pleasant for most people who lived in them. I think the whole point of the OP was not that we shouldn't think carefully about how we want to run our society so that our descendants can still live happy lives on it 1,000 years from now, but that we shouldn't simply say, "Industrial civilisation? Feh, it's bad" without really understanding how it works.
- hosh 6y ago
  > Before industrial society, people and land were also resources from which value was extracted, often quite literally belonging to a small group of people. Extractive value is the basis for most of civilizations, whether they are industrial or not. That's where we get the exploitation of labor (slavery, serfdoms, indentured servitude, etc.) and wars over resources (most of them) although the ecological footprint is much smaller compared to that of industrial societies. Many of those civilizations still devastated ecologies, communities, and human potential. What I am asserting is that it is not the industrial practices themselves but the whole paradigm of value-extraction (and its offshoots) that is the core problem. Industrialization mainly scaled up the problem. > I don't think that a purely extractive-value paradigm is the only way for an industrial society to run. Carol Sandford with the regenerative paradigms and to some extent, permaculture, has offered up non-extractive-value paradigms. > For example, if we better priced the harm that comes from things like fertiliser run-off and emissions from fertiliser manufacturing, would we still use synthetic fertilisers? Almost definitely yes, we would just be more careful about using it only where really required. That's coming from a "Do Less Harm" paradigm that's a typical response to "Value Extraction". It doesn't really address the core issue. Usually, the response to "Do Less Harm" is "Do More Good", but that has its own problems. At the core of extractive value is that some outside, externalizing process is controlling or regulating the behaviors of the people involved. Regenerative paradigms inverts that, where the intrinsic motivation of individuals are connected to some meaningful contribution. In other words, each individual looks for ways to contribute value to the society and whole, and their capabilities for doing so are developed so that they can. > The systems that were replaced by the early modern civilisation and then subsequently by industrial civilisation, were much more deeply unequal than our modern system, at least in NW Europe which is the history I know best. Those systems, often not quite accurately described as "feudalism" were much more sustainable but also not very pleasant for most people who lived in them. "Sustainability" is, I am sad to say, a "Do Less Harm" paradigm. Yeah, the not-quite-feudalism you speak of were sustainable as far as ecological footprint when compared to modern, industrial practices. They were still devastating to human potential, and to communities (all the various wars fought by various polities). Here, instead of trading houses that extracted value, the polity itself still exploited (extracted value) from their peasantry. While not all polities used their surpluses of food for wars of conquests, many did. The Roman Empire, for example, expanded until it collapsed. Qin Dynasty Chinese used their agricultural surplus and standardization of weapons manufacture (let's call that proto-industrial) in wars of conquest. Or look at the Hundred Years War in Europe -- conditions and incentives that lead to a period of brutality (to put it mildly). > what we shouldn't simply say, "Industrial civilisation? Feh, it's bad" without really understanding how it works. As I stated in my very first comment: It isn't as if I don't understand how it works. I make my statement because I understand how it works.
jackcosgrove 6y ago
> It is that my current thinking is that the extractive-value paradigm of the industrial processes has done far more harm than good. Entropy can only be reduced locally. All life is mining.
- discreteevent 6y ago
  Sure but how and what you mine matters. The sun is local and we are able to mine its energy directly rather than indirectly via a buffer (fossil fuels).
mitchbob 6y ago
> The work I am referring to comes from Carol Sandford...I don't know how much of a transformative effect she has. Just want to correct a spelling error: it's Carol Sanford. Her website is https://carolsanford.com/ https://carolsanford.com/ . I'm very interested to know how much change Sanford and people like her are making to businesses. My sense is significant change comes only when there's pressure from without, and only when failing to respond to that pressure will affect the bottom line. Businesses are not altruistic, and that's by design.

by hosh 6y ago

bearer_token 6y ago

> There are better ways, but they eat at the profit margin if you were only to maximize on profit, yield, and market value. If the goal, however, is towards the well-being of the community and the land in which things are farmed, then there are many methods with which we can accomplish that while still feeding people without requiring a huge amount of labor. But it comes from a different way of seeing the world. These goals are compatible. They require a government body, representing the well-being of the community, willing to tax externalities and use the funds to invest in revitalization. However, expecting government to be economically responsible is about as likely as expecting profit-maximizing corporate entities to be socially responsible.

hosh 6y ago
Those better ways I mentioned do not require a government body, or use of tax externalities. A lot of the exciting things in permaculture are coming from people putting things into practice first and then lobbying for those results. Permaculture has a lot of design principles and practices that can be deployed in a decentralized way. They do not require collective action or policy-making at a large scale. Ordinary people can make enough impact in their local ecology and community, and they can do it in a way that makes sense for their locality that may not make sense elsewhere. Furthermore, using Carol Sandford's method of deconstructing a frame, "requiring a government body" like you are talking about are: 1. The paradigm of behavioralism (rewards and incentives) 2. The idea that change requires heroic effort (something outside of you, such as the government, to make large scale changes) 3. Regulating these actions are a type of"Do Less Harm" or perhaps "Do More Good" paradigms. Those are reactions to "Value Extraction", and they don't really work, not enough to solve the fundamental problems of Value Extraction.
- kortilla 6y ago
  > Those better ways I mentioned do not require a government body, or use of tax externalities. They do if the profit margins are meaningfully lower. All it takes is a few actors to ignore costs that have no financial incentive to outgrow and overtake all of the competitors. Behaving better on your own is nice, but that’s not a societal solution because people throw away a lot of unnecessary niceties when the going gets tough. A majority of the population wants to stop climate change but the lack of a carbon tax means people still burn massive amounts of fuel and pay nothing to offset it. Instead we are taking this path of carbon-shaming and “do your best to reduce emissions” and it’s failing spectacularly. Without pricing externalities, you end up with assholes flying on private jets thousands of miles to give a talk on the importance of dealing with climate change without ever even offsetting their own footprint. People are consistently too stupid and too selfish across all populations to A) have even a rough grasp of their inputs/outputs from/to the environment and B) to make meaningful sacrifices if it actually requires a significant change in lifestyle. Just look how many people still buy gas cars that cost as much as electric cars because of “range anxiety”. Carol Sandford’s methods are likely not having any meaningful impact because they ignore the hard realities of economics. Behaviors need incentives and not using the government to implement those incentives through taxation/credits/fines just means trying to do it through social pressure. Social pressure is slow and ineffective at scale.

Robotbeat 6y ago

So, I don't know that profit, extractive-value, market-value, capitalizing are really the right frame, here. Alternative systems like the Soviet Union had similar paradigms without necessarily relying on profit. These industrial processes are necessary for addressing quality of life (including quantity of labor required, lenghth of working day required, etc) regardless of whether that system is profit-seeking or not. The Soviet Union had cars, fertilizer, pesticides, plastic, lots of oil and gas, antibiotics, vaccines, sanitation, and appliances for the same reason they're profitable in the West: it actually helps people's quality of life. That's why the essay is framed in terms of industry, not economic systems. Because that's somewhat orthogonal. (And I do think Chesterton's Fence would be a valuable point, here, too... Money and profit are tools for understanding and facilitating the efficiency of different activities, and to me the negative conditions of capitalism are a side effect of the efficiency it facilitates. If we're going to replace profit with something else, we must address how we're going to establish similar efficiencies. IMHO, a more established path than tearing down capitalism entirely would be to keep capitalism and profit, but just redistribute and rebalance, i.e. cut off the ends of the distribution to keep things from going crazy and eating itself.)

hosh 6y ago
EDIT: I reread the comment above and realized I did not adequately address it and I had misunderstood some of what the commenter was saying. I revised my answer below: I disagree that we necessarily need to have synthetic fertalizers, pest control, etc. There are a number of methods from permaculture that does not require synthetic fertilizers, weed killers, and pest killers. The whole site is analyzed together and designed in a way there there is a cycling of nutrients back into the soil, or amendments such as biochar or mycological growth help with that. (Synthetic fertilizers actually deplete soil fertility in the long run, so you have to keep adding more and more with every cycle). Interplanting, plant guilds, and "integrated pest control" (chickens, duck, goats, and developing habitat for the pest's natural predators). The maximum yield may be lower, but designing a site this way accomplishes two things. First, it is far more resilient than the industrial agricultural method. Second, it puts fertility back into the land faster than it uses it up, and as such, it has the potential to restore the ecology. These are things people are already putting into practice around the world. Furthermore, what the Soviet Union had was still essentially value-extraction. That value was distributed in a different way, but it is still value-extraction. It is still stuck in the same paradigm, and arguably worse -- too rigid, too unable to adapt to changing conditions. A regenerative paradigm does not put profit first, but it doesn't necessarily dispense with it either. (In the permaculture community, that is the third permaculture ethic: Fair Share). It is as decentralized as a free-market, but is not centralized like the way capitalization tends towards aggregation of resources. One key difference between a regenerative paradigm and the value-extraction: Free-market is driven from profit motive, the selfish actor. Regenerative living is driven by individual's own sense of what value they can contribute to the greater whole, and developing their own personal capabilities in order to accomplish it. So one is a value extraction and the other is a value generation or value adding (not to be confused with "value-added", which is something from the value-extraction paradigm). Even if we were to say, ok, this regenerative paradigm works, and let's shift to that, it is not something that can be done through policy changes.

loupeabody 6y ago

Extremely glad to see your measured response to this article. Seeing the tacit approval of synthetic fertilizers in the article made me reel. It's a shame that farming methods like permaculture aren't a part of this conversation by default. For the reason they're not often discussed, I defer to your conclusion about needing to adopt a new perceptual framework and value system to effect certain kinds of change. It's been several years since we last spoke Hosh, so I was very pleasantly surprised to find myself agreeing with your comment here. Hope you and your family are well!

hosh 6y ago
Hey man, glad to see you about! Hope things are going well. Send me some email sometime and let's catch up.
roel_v 6y ago
Have you actually done any permaculture, and/or run the numbers on what it would take to move away from synthetic fertilizers? The reason permaculture isn't part of the default is because it's a pipe dream. A hobby for those interested in it, but not a real, scalable alternative for what we have now.
- sjy 6y ago
  I just asked for some pro-permaculture sources in this comment [1], and would appreciate it if you could also point me in the direction of some further reading on the claim that permaculture is a pipe dream. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24648887 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24648887
  - adrianN 6y ago
    Organic agriculture has much lower yields than conventional agriculture for most crops [1]. I believe permaculture is more restrictive than US-Organic. It would take some big changes in our diet to absorb such a loss in productivity. [1] https://geneticliteracyproject.org/2018/02/16/usda-data-confirm-organic-yields-dramatically-lower-conventional-farming/ https://geneticliteracyproject.org/2018/02/16/usda-data-conf...

TeeMassive 6y ago

> Both people and land have been turned into resources by which value is extracted and capitalized. This has lead to a wide-spread devastation in our ecology, in our communities, and our human potential. It's a process that is moving towards degeneration, and we see many of those effects -- from growing equality gaps, to the radicalization of angry young people, and so forth. The problem with this kind of points of view like this one is that it never considers that the population are consumers too and are motivated to work and "extract capital" from themselves for themselves. Once those who promote those ideas move from opposition to those who occupied it they are confronted to the exact same problems to solve but without the "evil" solutions.

hosh 6y ago
> The problem with every this kind of points of view like this one is that it never considers that the population are consumers too and are motivated to work and "extract capital" from themselves for themselves. Unless you are working for yourself, you're not really "extracting capital" from yourself. There was an article I recently read here on HN about negotiating salary as an engineer. I have been leaving a lot of money on the table. Depending on who you work for, the corporate organizations don't really care who you are. If you are able to frame your work in terms of how much revenue you can generate for them, you can negotiate terms that are much more favorable to you. > Once those who promote those ideas move from opposition to those who occupied it they are confronted to the exact same problems to solve but without the "evil" solutions. I have written elsewhere about a different way of viewing it. There are people who see "Value Extraction" and go on to "Do Less Harm" or "Do More Good", but those do not fundamentally address the problems with "Value Extraction". One of the things that shift it completely out of value extraction is to invert it. Rather than being a consumer of value and regulated by extrinsic motivation, you as an individual find your intrinsic motivation to contribute meaningful value to the world.
- kortilla 6y ago
  > Unless you are working for yourself, you're not really "extracting capital" from yourself. You are selling programming as a service to a company. That’s extracting capital in the same way that the company will when they sell a SaaS or even directly resell your programming.

schoen 6y ago

> But take the idea of having to use synthetic fertilizers and pest control. The corresponding "industrial literacy" element is the statistic that half of the nitrogen in human bodies in the world was fixed from the atmosphere through the Haber-Bosch process. That doesn't mean that we should assume that there's no other way to get nitrogen fixation, but I imagine it means we should realize that changing that in order to do without synthetic fertilizers, or even reduce the use of them dramatically, is a really, really big undertaking. (I've been vegan or vegetarian for the past 80% of my life, but my carbon footprint is still way above the global average because of my heavy use of airplanes. Well, not this year, maybe. Anyway, one way I notice that I'm lacking in industrial literacy in the sense of this article: I honestly don't know whether my diet puts me above or below the world average in ratio of Haber-Bosch-fixed nitrogen in my body! I think noticing my uncertainty about that makes me more sympathetic to the idea of the original article, though.)

baybal2 6y ago
> The corresponding "industrial literacy" element is the statistic that half of the nitrogen in human bodies in the world was fixed from the atmosphere through the Haber-Bosch process. That doesn't mean that we should assume that there's no other way to get nitrogen fixation, but I imagine it means we should realize that changing that in order to do without synthetic fertilizers, or even reduce the use of them dramatically, is a really, really big undertaking. Some years ago, I read an American defence analyst claiming that USA is just 4 biggest fertilizer stockpiles away from starvation, if no imports are possible. And the globe as well is dangerously reliant on a dozen of so "megaplants."
- schoen 6y ago
  I also think this understanding of vulnerability is a benefit of industrial literacy.

CryptoPunk 6y ago

>>It is that my current thinking is that the extractive-value paradigm of the industrial processes has done far more harm than good. Not for humanity. The rate of extreme poverty has declined at its fastest in human history over the last 30 years. I don't know if you've ever had close contact with people living at or close to extreme poverty. It's hard for me to imagine anyone having such a familiarity, and not believing industrial civilization has done more good than harm, at least when measured in terms of the quality of life of people.

jahaja 6y ago
To nuance this once again by Jason Hickel: "If we use $7.40 per day, we see a decline in the proportion of people living in poverty, but it’s not nearly as dramatic as your rosy narrative would have it. In 1981 a staggering 71% lived in poverty. Today it hovers at 58% (for 2013, the most recent data). Suddenly your grand story of progress seems tepid, mediocre, and – in a world that’s as fabulously rich as ours – completely obscene. There is nothing worth celebrating about a world where inequality is so extreme that 58% of people are in poverty, while a few dozen billionaires have more than all of their wealth combined."
- CryptoPunk 6y ago
  He says the rate of progress seems tepid. But tepid compared to what? This has been the fastest reduction in the poverty rate in human history. And this reduction in the poverty rate has occurred amidst a massive population explosion, unlike say the 14th century's poverty decline, which happened as 1/3rd of the population died from the Black Death, which raised the area of arable land per capita. Also, to nuance your nuance, Hickel cites just the poverty rate. The rate of extreme poverty has dropped much more drastically: "The World Bank Group’s goals are to end extreme poverty and promote shared prosperity. This mission underpins all of our analytical, operational, and convening work in more than 145 client countries. There has been marked progress on reducing poverty – the first of the world’s Sustainable Development Goals – over the past decades. According to the most recent estimates, in 2015, 10 percent of the world’s population or 734 million people lived on less than $1.90 a day. That’s down from nearly 36 percent or 1.9 billion people in 1990." No, the cynical outlook has no legs to stand on. Humanity is succeeding magnificently at improving its own condition, according to all direct indicators and historical standards. My only major concern is the damage industrial civilization is doing to the larger ecosystem, as thousands of species are driven to extinction as human settlements and farms engulfs their natural habitats.

sjy 6y ago

You seem like a smart person who writes well, and I’ve met a few such people with an interest in permaculture. What do you think about the claims that it’s pseudoscientific, and prescribes agricultural methods that couldn’t possibly feed the current global population? I’m not advancing these claims myself – I know very little about permaculture – but I have done a few searches to try to learn more and I’m really put off by the lack of a clear definition and the conspiratorial, anti-science views that many proponents of the concept (philosophy? theory? movement?) seem to express. I’m also thoroughly confused by the relationship between permaculture and agroecology, which seems like another word for the same thing to me. I found an article in a permaculture publication [1] which acknowledges unscientific thinking as a major problem for permaculture, while defending the concept as something to be promoted and advanced in a scientific way. I’d be interested in reading more work like this, or preferably, something published in a mainstream science journal which permaculture advocates like you accept as fair comment. The author of the article I’ve mentioned seems to dismiss my preference for those sources as “fetishizing the outputs of big-money science” – do you agree with that? [1] http://liberationecology.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/Ferguson.PeoplesScience.PrePrint.pdf http://liberationecology.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/Ferg...

maranud 6y ago
This might be worth looking into: https://www.fermedubec.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/ENGLISH-viability_organic_market_garden_without_motorization_paper.pdf https://www.fermedubec.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/ENGLIS... The final version can be requested here: https://www.pubhort.org/actahort/books/1137/1137_47.htm https://www.pubhort.org/actahort/books/1137/1137_47.htm
tastyfreeze 6y ago
I've been studying permaculture/regenerative agriculture for a couple years. I think part of the problem is that you will find a broad spectrum of practitioners. From hobbyists, that just apply a practice because somebody else had success with it. To professionals, like Joel Salatin and Richard Perkins, that record everything, perform experiments, and improve process. The professionals are less Mollison style permaculture design and more regenerative agriculture. The basic idea is the same. Work with nature instead of against. Permaculture as a hobby is just another school of gardening with an eye to efficiency and permanence. You will find as many opinions of the "best" way as there are people. It doesn't help that some practices are very specific to local climate. Papers on soil microbiome and rhizosphere interactions are the basis of regenerative agriculture practices. If you want to understand how these practices can feed the world I would start there. PS Now that I have written this, I realize it doesn't really address your criticism. Look towards regenerative agriculture to feed the world over permaculture. While permaculture can be applied at large scale it is more of a homestead practice of planning your land use for efficiency of your own food production. Agroecology and agroforestry are terms for building ecosystems that provide agricultural output. Something like a nut tree forest with berry understory and mushroom production on rotting logs with farm animals roaming about. An agricultural plot planned to perform as an ecosystem with as many niches producing output as possible.

roenxi 6y ago

> But take the idea of having to use synthetic fertilizers and pest control. There are better ways, but they eat at the profit margin if you were only to maximize on profit, yield, and market value. Society relies on their being massive agricultural surplus so that only a few people need to be farmers and the rest of us can go and do other things. If farm yields drop, more land (and people) need to be farmers. If profit margins shrink from changes in farming technique, then either either less is being produced (again, requiring more land & farmers) or more resources being consumed (requiring more raw materials being diverted away from producing comfort and towards producing food). Profits and yields are not small matters, they are ratios in the equation of how many people we free up from being farmers. We have made enormous strides by freeing up people from toiling away as farmers. There is a long debate to be had about whether taking steps to wind that back is a good idea.

crispyambulance 6y ago
> There is a long debate to be had about whether taking steps to wind that back is a good idea. It depends on what you exactly mean by "winding that back". Putting ecological and global warming concerns on the table-of-consideration along with market imperatives is not only reasonable but responsible. Ironically, the best example of profit/yield imperatives above all else is the corn/fructose industry. This industry is heavily subsidized because of decades of political finagling. They're bad for the environment and not really profitable without subsidies. The corn industry has "won" the race to the bottom and maximized yield at the expense of everything else. Supply chain technologies are now starting to enable small farmers to provide sustainable goods and still make a living without being a cog in a huge corporation. Suppliers are increasingly doing that. Is it going to completely replace the corn/fructose industry? no, but it can move us in the right direction over time.
catawbasam 6y ago
You seem to believe fewer farmers is better. There are people out who would like to be farmers but can't pull it off because the current system makes it hard to start small and build up.
- 6y ago

Mvandenbergh 6y ago

>It is that my current thinking is that the extractive-value paradigm of the industrial processes has done far more harm than good. Both people and land have been turned into resources by which value is extracted and capitalized. Before industrial society, people and land were also resources from which value was extracted, often quite literally belonging to a small group of people. I don't think that a purely extractive-value paradigm is the only way for an industrial society to run. For example, if we better priced the harm that comes from things like fertiliser run-off and emissions from fertiliser manufacturing, would we still use synthetic fertilisers? Almost definitely yes, we would just be more careful about using it only where really required. >It's a process that is moving towards degeneration, and we see many of those effects -- from growing equality gaps, to the radicalization of angry young people, and so forth. I think we need to be quite careful with our history here. The systems that were replaced by the early modern civilisation and then subsequently by industrial civilisation, were much more deeply unequal than our modern system, at least in NW Europe which is the history I know best. Those systems, often not quite accurately described as "feudalism" were much more sustainable but also not very pleasant for most people who lived in them. I think the whole point of the OP was not that we shouldn't think carefully about how we want to run our society so that our descendants can still live happy lives on it 1,000 years from now, but that we shouldn't simply say, "Industrial civilisation? Feh, it's bad" without really understanding how it works.

hosh 6y ago
> Before industrial society, people and land were also resources from which value was extracted, often quite literally belonging to a small group of people. Extractive value is the basis for most of civilizations, whether they are industrial or not. That's where we get the exploitation of labor (slavery, serfdoms, indentured servitude, etc.) and wars over resources (most of them) although the ecological footprint is much smaller compared to that of industrial societies. Many of those civilizations still devastated ecologies, communities, and human potential. What I am asserting is that it is not the industrial practices themselves but the whole paradigm of value-extraction (and its offshoots) that is the core problem. Industrialization mainly scaled up the problem. > I don't think that a purely extractive-value paradigm is the only way for an industrial society to run. Carol Sandford with the regenerative paradigms and to some extent, permaculture, has offered up non-extractive-value paradigms. > For example, if we better priced the harm that comes from things like fertiliser run-off and emissions from fertiliser manufacturing, would we still use synthetic fertilisers? Almost definitely yes, we would just be more careful about using it only where really required. That's coming from a "Do Less Harm" paradigm that's a typical response to "Value Extraction". It doesn't really address the core issue. Usually, the response to "Do Less Harm" is "Do More Good", but that has its own problems. At the core of extractive value is that some outside, externalizing process is controlling or regulating the behaviors of the people involved. Regenerative paradigms inverts that, where the intrinsic motivation of individuals are connected to some meaningful contribution. In other words, each individual looks for ways to contribute value to the society and whole, and their capabilities for doing so are developed so that they can. > The systems that were replaced by the early modern civilisation and then subsequently by industrial civilisation, were much more deeply unequal than our modern system, at least in NW Europe which is the history I know best. Those systems, often not quite accurately described as "feudalism" were much more sustainable but also not very pleasant for most people who lived in them. "Sustainability" is, I am sad to say, a "Do Less Harm" paradigm. Yeah, the not-quite-feudalism you speak of were sustainable as far as ecological footprint when compared to modern, industrial practices. They were still devastating to human potential, and to communities (all the various wars fought by various polities). Here, instead of trading houses that extracted value, the polity itself still exploited (extracted value) from their peasantry. While not all polities used their surpluses of food for wars of conquests, many did. The Roman Empire, for example, expanded until it collapsed. Qin Dynasty Chinese used their agricultural surplus and standardization of weapons manufacture (let's call that proto-industrial) in wars of conquest. Or look at the Hundred Years War in Europe -- conditions and incentives that lead to a period of brutality (to put it mildly). > what we shouldn't simply say, "Industrial civilisation? Feh, it's bad" without really understanding how it works. As I stated in my very first comment: It isn't as if I don't understand how it works. I make my statement because I understand how it works.

jackcosgrove 6y ago

> It is that my current thinking is that the extractive-value paradigm of the industrial processes has done far more harm than good. Entropy can only be reduced locally. All life is mining.

discreteevent 6y ago
Sure but how and what you mine matters. The sun is local and we are able to mine its energy directly rather than indirectly via a buffer (fossil fuels).

mitchbob 6y ago

> The work I am referring to comes from Carol Sandford...I don't know how much of a transformative effect she has. Just want to correct a spelling error: it's Carol Sanford. Her website is https://carolsanford.com/ https://carolsanford.com/ . I'm very interested to know how much change Sanford and people like her are making to businesses. My sense is significant change comes only when there's pressure from without, and only when failing to respond to that pressure will affect the bottom line. Businesses are not altruistic, and that's by design.