Again, efficient in what context? Yes, it's absolutely amazing how fast we produce obscene amounts of t-shirts to sell to everyone. And those t-shirts last a fe

Again, efficient in what context? Yes, it's absolutely amazing how fast we produce obscene amounts of t-shirts to sell to everyone. And those t-shirts last a few wears and wash cycles and then you need another. So you need to grow more cotton, produce more dye, extract more labour from poor Bangladeshi mothers and their children, so you can get more dollars per year from all the t-shirts etc. That sounds to me like it's really efficient at making a few people really rich, really efficiently using up lots of land and resources and peoples' time to make shit I don't really need. All I want is a few t-shirts and trousers that last and to let everyone spend more time doing fun things like playing games and making art. But we really aren't good at doing that, are we? I understand that it's foolish for all of us to start growing our own rice and potatoes -- and yes, I think that's because of "economies of scale" and the benefits of specialisation -- I wouldn't really advocate for that radical a shift. But there is certainly something that is more sensible than the insanity of overconsumption and waste that we are engaging in right now, and that applies to the food industry too. Economies of scale in food production are really complicated. Yes, to first order, you can make more food with bigger machines over larger land masses, but at what cost? And for how long? We can already see a lot of fallout from overuse of land, overuse of synthetic fertilisers, destruction of ecodiversity. This is not to mention that agribusiness has massive crop losses calculated into the cost, crop losses that occur exactly because of the monocultural practices. Permaculture is harder to scale because it is more complex, it takes local ecosystem dynamics and microclimates into account and works with them to be more productive per acre and less destructive in the long term. So it's actually more efficient in many ways. While everyone talking about specialisation and scale sure may feel that they are smarter than the person asking for a return to a more "simple" approach, I really believe they are the ones offering the more simplistic and erroneous solutions... You could make a good analogy with "technical debt". Climate change and irreversible environmental damage (e.g. corral reef death) is like the technical debt of industrialisation finally rearing its head because we didn't account for it while scaling. It turns out we should have scaled our food production etc. in a more sustainable way so now we will be paying the price. With a LOT of interest.