How The Cook Saved the World

 I have been gardening a long time now.  I don’t remember the first time I put a seed in the ground and came back later to see a glorious plant.  I must have been very young.  So it is sixty plus years now.  First I learned every thing I could about traditional gardening and then organic gardening and now, at 71, I am finally beginning to understand how wrong I have been all these years.  I think I must be a slow learner.    Just as an example, the common wisdom in gardening is that we cannot plant our warm season seeds until the ground is warm.  That wisdom tells us that the seeds will rot if planted too early.  Yet, I have picked batches of pole beans from plants that volunteered in my garden.  The seeds were scattered after some beans dried on the vine and they spent the winter out there.  I have a friend who counsels patience in all things because, when the conditions are right the seeds will grow.

    I graduated from college in 1974.  At the time I was reading The Mother Earth News cover to cover along with Rodale Press’ Organic Gardening and Farming.  The idea was that we could be ‘self-sufficient’.  Thinking back, that whole idea is an oxymoron.  In an interconnected world we can only find sufficiency through our relationships with other living things.

    Gardening wisdom tells us that the most important part of gardening is ‘preparing the soil’.  The soil is prepared by digging it up and turning it over.  It’s called tilling.  If it is fertile soil you can go ahead and plant.  But tilling the soil and traditional planting deplete the fertility and so part of preparing the soil is to till in compost or synthetic fertilizers.  Yet, if you just leave a piece of ground be, leaving it fallow, nature will build up the fertility.  Tilling the soil destroys our relationship with the organisms nature evolved to support plant life.

    In 1986 I experienced a watershed event.   I dragged my wife, and kids of 4 and 2 years, to the Second North American Bioregional Congress in Wisconsin.  I thought I could contribute to making the world a better place for the generations to come.  What I discovered is that no one attending had any idea how the existing system works (including me) . . . let alone offering a practical idea of how to make it work better.

    I decided then that I would take five years, earn enough money to pursue the ideas I wanted to pursue, and figure this stuff out.  It took me eighteen years for the ‘earn enough money’ part.  As I said, I must be a slow learner.

    Those eighteen years I kept gardening.  The ground I own is heavy yellow clay and I did a lot of tilling.  In the beginning I was double digging and adding lots of mulch as the plants grew.  That worked pretty good much of the time, except for voles and things.  When I got busy at work and got a rototiller, I quickly burned every bit of organic matter out of that clay.  I was very disappointed.

    In 2004 I had finally “earned enough money”, sold my law practice, and read the Permaculture Design Manual.  There I learned about a permaculture technique called ‘sheet mulching’ and began experimenting with no till gardening.  The hardest part about that, for me, was the concept that seeds need to be in contact with soil.  It turns out to be much more complex than that.  When I cut through the sheet mulch and planted in the clay the seeds struggled.  When I planted in the mulch the plants would sit for a while and then suddenly explode in wondrous growth.

    To share this technique I started a business called Organic Landscape Design and began promoting this no-till way of gardening.   That led to an agreement with David Ward of Nice-World who was interested in building community gardens.  Our first joint effort in 2009 was at a church in Broomfield.  I developed a poster explaining what we were doing and used it in talks to any group that would listen.

 

    By 2011 David and I had 7 community gardens in the metro area.  As far as I know there are two still active, one at the Grange in Broomfield and one at Regis University.  These gardens were built with hay and manure according to the directions documented in Toby Hemenway’s ‘Gaia’s Garden’.

    One of these community gardens was known as ‘The Digital Garden on Leetsdale’ run by Leo Kacenjar.  Leo built his beds with wood chips instead of hay.  The problem with using wood chips is that, as everyone knows, wood in the garden ties up all the nitrogen.  For example, an expertly built compost pile will contain one nitrogen molecule for every 30 carbon molecules.  A wood chip has about 500 carbons to every nitrogen, while hay is about the perfect 30 to 1.  Yet, Leo’s wood chip beds performed just as well as the hay beds.

    In 2011 I did an experiment to test Leo’s results.  The experiment was a round bed in my Mother’s front yard.  We used hay on 1/3, wood chips on 1/3, and a mix of sticks and wood chips on 1/3.  The plants did just fine in all three sections.  However, the hay in the hay sections was all used up in that first year.  The wood chip section lasted four years.  I planted the sticks and wood chip section for 6 years before I added more material.

    As you see from the diagram above, we are using about 3 inches of manure for 12 inches of organic matter.  As far as the plants are concerned, it does not seem to matter whether we are using hay, wood chips, or logs (except we need wood chips on top of logs to root the seeds).  What does seem to make a difference is the freshness of the manure.  The only failed sheet mulches I have ever built were built with old (aged) manure.

    It is a gardening truism that we cannot use fresh manures because those contain too much nitrogen and that will burn your plants.  Yet, here I was using raw wood and fresh manure and my plants had plenty of nitrogen and were not burned.  Clearly we had a lot to learn about the relationships between plants and soils.

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    My goal throughout this process has been to share an idea.  I wanted to share the idea that it is possible to ‘heal nature and produce abundance’ if we understand that we are ‘already a part of a community that consists of all the living things around us and that our individual well being cannot be separated from the well being of that community’.  To heal nature we stop doing those things that break apart natural relationships and facilitate the regeneration of the missing connections.

    To further that goal, I have been experimenting with what we call ‘integrated systems of production’ combining our gardens with our greenhouse and our chicken flock, bees, pollinator plantings, hay field, and natural areas.  By placing these processes in proximity we increase the amount of carbon (in the form of organic molecules) cycling through our system and build up resources in the system cycle over cycle.  Our deep mulch polycultures are the most obvious result of that experimentation but the ultimate pattern we seek is much more inclusive than that.

    In order to share this information I have tried everything I could think of:

– Meet Up Group – I took over the Greater Denver Urban Homesteading Meet Up Group, maybe 12 years ago, and asked everyone doing these kinds of project to post their events there.  I also posted the events I was holding and over the years we built up membership in the meetup group to (at the time of this writing) 4,363 urban homesteaders.

– E-Mail List – I annually held a series of events about deep mulch gardening, greenhouses, chickens, and scything.  At the events I held, I let people sign up for our newsletter and over the years have acquired over 500 subscribers.

– Internships – Every year I have had at least one intern and sometimes as many as 6 working with me at any one time.  You can see some of their testimonials on the web site.

– Green House – In 2012 we built a green house attached to the south side of my mother’s house.  It is intended as a demonstration of an inexpensive structure, that can be attached to the south side of any building, and produce fresh greens and protein year round.  We continue to experiment with it.

– Seed Saving and Chicken Breeding – I have been saving seeds from certain tomatoes since 2009 and have also saved seeds from a variety of pie pumpkin.  I have experiments with saving carrot seeds and we let other plants, such as lettuce and pole beans reseed themselves.  We started our chicken flock, and started raising our own chicks in 2011.  A lot more could be done if we could coordinate these activities as a community.

– Bee Hive Builds – We held bee hive builds.  We bought some sheets of plywood and invited budding beekeepers to contribute $100 and participate in building their own hives. This was a popular event, however, our lead beekeeper decided that purchased boxes were better for his business and we stopped holding this event after three successful years.

– Plant Sales – A couple of springs we invited people to bring the plants they were growing to a plant sale.  We had fun but there is a lot of competition for plant sales in May and I didn’t know how to make ours distinctive.

– Community Organizing – Applying carbon cycling technologies is best accomplished at the scale of neighborhood and over the years I have promoted a number of ideas to facilitate that.  We had the community gardens, we had the API gardening team, we had a workshop called “Principles of Community Design“, we set up the High Plains Plant Propagation Cooperative which has now evolved into the “Neighborhood Nursery Project“, and we had our most successful project called Bee Safe Neighborhoods.

– Bee Safe Neighborhoods –  Through the Bee Safe Neighborhood projects we signed up 74 different neighborhood coordinators around the country and into Canada.  Of those, 6 neighborhoods and 3 organizations were successful at signing up 75 contiguous neighbors to pledge to abstain from systemic poisons.  See the Coordinator List and the Honor Roll.  We never had the resources to promote the Bee Safe Neighborhoods ourselves.  For a while a group in Boulder was doing it and at one time the People and Pollinators Action Network expressed interest.  The program was also adopted by the City of Lakewood as a part of its Sustainable Neighborhood Program.  You may have seen the signs around.

– Reinhabit Cooperative –  Originally known as the Cook and Gardener Project, the Reinhabit Cooperative teaches carbon cycling techniques to people looking to build a career as gardeners who will work with homeowners to create thriving habitats on their properties.  Since the year 2020 we have engaged 30+ homeowners hiring 13 different gardeners.  In 2022 our gardeners earned $8,430 through LSI plus what they billed directly.  In 2023 that number rose to $13,188.  In the long term, if successful, this project will produce an abundance of food and we intend to begin the ‘Cook’ part of the project.

– Cook What You Grow – In anticipation of starting the cook part of ‘The Cook and the Gardener’ I wrote a cook book.  It is a book about the biggest problems we humans face on this planet.  Those problems can be traced to our relationships with the smallest of organisms. Part cookbook, part history lesson, part healthy living guide, this short work shows us a pathway to a positive future.

– Web Site – I have also done a lot of social media networking (mostly on Face Book) trying to refine the language we use to convey the message.  The results of that effort are shown on the web site we redeveloped in 2021 to make it functional on mobile devises.  In addition to documenting the programs discussed above, there are numerous works about the power of individuals and communities to create the kind of world we would wish for our grandchildren.  In that regard, I am most proud of Agents of Habitat.

– Agents of Habitat –  This is a series of 12 lessons about individuals taking the future of the world into their own hands.  I have taken things about as far as I can. We are in process of transferring responsibility for the Living Systems Institute to a new generation.  One of the most important tasks they have is to take the lessons of Agents of Habitat and make them more accessible for the generations that follow.  What we have accomplished to date was done without substantial funding and was only possible because I did not need a salary.  We are no longer able to run an all volunteer organization.  If this work is to proceed we will need to pay those who dedicate their time to a brighter future.

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    The problem with running 7 different community gardens is that there is no way to control how much a member of the community absorbs when I present these ideas. Everyone comes with some understanding about gardening that differs from what I was teaching and that other understanding was always liable to express itself.

    I called what we were doing a No Weed, No Water, No Till, Deep Mulch, Drip Irrigated Gardening System.  The no weed part is what is hardest for people.  There are plants that will grow up and want to take the light we want for our crops.  These plants are not weeds, they are potential mulch.  They are not rooted in the soil but rather the mulch so they are easy to pull.  The longer we wait to pull them the more mulch they are.  When the volunteers begin to take the light from our crops we pull these volunteer plants and lay them down right where they grew.  Because we have a healthy soil ecosystem those plants are quickly cycled through fungi and bacteria and back to our plants.

    I would give my presentation at the beginning of the gardening season and then tour the gardens throughout the season.  Consistently I would find piles of organic matter pulled out of the gardens and wasted.  Or, the alternative, new gardeners could not tell the difference between the crops they were growing and the volunteers and the volunteers were outgrowing the crops.  Either way, a partial understanding of the process does not work well.

    It is also true that Organic Landscape Design was not making any money.  As a result I decided that I would make people come and see my gardens and offer to teach them the right way to do things.  I started the Applewood Permaculture Institute (API) and set about demonstrating how a neighborhood gardening team might work.

    The API gardening team grew over a year or two to some 20 members spread over the west metro area.  As a team, we built deep mulch gardens for everyone who wanted one, built chicken coops for everyone who wanted one, and built bee hives for everyone who wanted one.  But, we were not tied to a neighborhood and the active members became spread too thin.  I asked the team members to follow up in their own neighborhoods but as far as I know, there are no active neighborhood gardening teams doing what we were doing.

    It was during this time that I decided to go ahead and set up a non-profit organization.  The Living Systems Institute (LSI) was granted its tax exempt status as of January 2013.  LSI continued the work of the preceding organizations but, even as a non-profit we have been unable to attract funding.  Hopefully, this new generation taking over, will be able to design projects attractive to funders.  It is clear that my learning was much too slow for that.

    All of that brings me to the most important of the erroneous assumptions that prevent us from creating the world we want.  Our culture believes that there is a struggle between good and evil.  But there is no such thing as good and bad in a complex adaptive system.  The system is what it is.  It is a pattern of interactions among those living organisms that can survive in the pattern.  We can influence the pattern toward more diversity or less diversity.  A diverse pattern of interactions builds resources into itself cycle over cycle.  A monoculture, where the competition is eradicated, requires constant inputs from outside.  At the level of the living system on this planet, the only available inputs are those resources stored up from before.

    We are beginning to learn the science of that for plants in a garden.  The plants exude sugars into the soil to attract fungi and bacteria.  In exchange for the sugars the bacteria provide usable nitrogen and the fungi bring water and minerals.  In an organic monoculture that system can work at a low level.  When we companion plant and use volunteers as mulch, the system will experience what biologists call quorum sensing.  Quorum sensing is a significant increase in biological activity in the soil that occurs when a certain diversity of plants is reached.

    In essence, the plants in a natural setting cooperate underground with the soil organisms to create a thriving pattern of interactions.  Above ground they compete for light but we can intervene to achieve both food for ourselves and a thriving soil ecosystem.  We intervene in the way that our ancestors and other animals have always adjusted the pattern of plants in the system.  This same lesson applies to the pattern of interactions that make up our communities.

     I wish I had learned fast enough to experience a thriving community based on understanding this principle of cooperation among diverse elements of a system.  And while there are many organizations working on various aspects of the problems facing our species, I know of none besides the Living Systems Institute that is researching, designing, and testing the whole pattern of interactions at the scale that directly affects individual organisms.  That is the scale of soils and neighborhoods.  I would think that our culture would want to fund that work.

My daughter got me a book for Christmas called “Animal, Vegetable, Junk” by Mark Bittman. It is a review of the history of how agriculture became an environment destroying profit center for middle men that delivers neither a living to farmers nor nutrition to consumers.  Of course, I agree with all that.

    The author points out that industrial agriculture is based on reductionist science that erroneously believes that we can manipulate complex systems by understanding their parts.  That thinking leads to believing that plants only require nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium and that humans only require carbohydrates, fats, and proteins (with a few added vitamins and minerals).   He refers to the alternative as “agroecology”.  By this he means an agriculture that works with nature’s processes to produce nutritious food for humans based on an understanding that sustainable food production is an emergent property of an ecological whole.

    Bittman goes on to talk about how peasant farming systems still feed 70% of the world’s population and that agroecology is inherently more productive than industrial agriculture because it produces at least as much as industrial agriculture per acre with substantially lower input costs, other than labor costs.  It has the added benefits of producing nutritious food and not destroying the biosphere.

    So far we are on the same page.

    Bittman acknowledges that none of us knows how it will actually work to transform the food system to something that makes sense to people.  He suggests that we can do such things as put a tax on soda pop and require better labeling.  We might consider Bittman’s view is the leading edge of mainstream thinking regarding the caution with which we should approach reductionist science and the power of what is known as “systems thinking”.

    I like to encourage this deeper understanding of the scientific process.  As we begin to understand problems as “systemic” we begin to reduce the unintended consequences of applying technology as we have in the past.  However, the leading edge of mainstream thinking has not yet moved far enough. 

    Bittman’s view misses an important point, as does the view of many other thinkers worried about the future of humans on this planet.  That point is that most of the systems that concern these thinkers are also parts of an even more inclusive system.  Without that understanding most people continue to propose market and government solutions that fail to reach the real issue.  That issue is the relationship between humans and the living things around them.

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    What most commentators miss, and what we share through the Living Systems Institute and the Agents of Habitat series, is that we cannot fix agriculture (or any other subsystem) independent of the larger complex system of which it is a part.

    The agricultural system is a part of the economic system which is a part of the system I call “the Living System on this Planet” (LSP).  The LSP is a pattern of interactions among the constituent parts of the economic system, the social system, and the ecosystem.  Any change in the practices of any of the parts has repercussions through out the whole LSP and is subject to the resistance to change inherent in each of those parts.

    For example, let’s say we were able to devise a series of taxes and government support programs that effectively changed agriculture into an environmentally friendly version of itself.  It is hard for me to imagine how it might work but let’s imagine a market system of food production that no longer needs chemical fertilizers or pesticides and produces nutrient dense foods.  Everything else being equal we would still be producing food for rich people.  The biggest portion of the human population would still be unable to find a job that pays a living wage and would still not have the capacity to produce food for themselves.

    I am not saying government programs can’t be helpful.  They might be able to slow the destruction.  However, that kind of change to the agricultural system will be insufficient to create the stable, peaceful, and egalitarian world we wish for our great-grand children.

    As explored in the Agents of Habitat Series, a stable, peaceful, egalitarian world can only be based on a stable, peaceful, and egalitarian pattern of interactions at the scale of community and ultimately, beginning at the scale of neighborhood.  We will realize such a world when neighborhoods embrace their role as contributing members of a thriving ecosystem in which all of the participants are supported in their quest to be fed, safe, and loved.  We will develop an understanding that community includes all the living things around us.  We will embrace our role in the LSP.  We will be able to support that community in healing itself and producing an abundance of the food, shelter, learning, health, belonging, and purpose each individual human needs to thrive.

    I have called the process I am describing as “Community Sufficiency Technologies” meaning the know how to organize ourselves to provide for ourselves.  It is a process of investing in the capacity of people to do things on their own without needing to rely on the market or government.

    As I wrote in Lesson 5 of Agents of Habitat, A Welcoming Place,

    “When we assign responsibility for the condition of the world to someone else we give them our power to create it. Think of it this way:

• We will not change the way that government works,
• We will not change the way business works,
• We will not change the way ecosystems work, 

    We can only change what we control. We can change the way we interact with the individuals of the many species resident within our locality. If we make these interactions productive, so as to sustain them, the ecosystem will change, business will change and government will change in response.”

    I am not saying that we should be silent about the abuses of business and government.  I am saying that, to effectively create change, we must demonstrate a viable alternative at the same time.  That alternative is for all the members of a community (rich and poor) to work together to heal nature and produce abundance.

    That is why we developed the technologies of deep mulch gardens and integrated closed loop production systems. They are a way to create an ecologically sound agriculture right where we live.  That is why we sought out ways for neighbors to work together to build habitat such as Bee Safe Neighborhoods, Neighborhood Plant Nurseries, and the Reinhabit Cooperative.  What we have done so far is only scratching the surface of what can be done to realize the full biological potential of the Living System on this Planet.

    As a final point, I want to discuss the compatibility of stable, peaceful, and egalitarian communities that have the capacity to provide for themselves, with global economic and nation state power.  I do not see international corporations or national governments withering away.  Rather, we will still be able to buy big screen TVs and electric cars, for example, and we will still want to pay taxes for things like roads and bridges, water systems, and protection from those not yet adapted.  What will be different is that no one who is part of such a community will have to take a job . . .

. . . and they will only take jobs, where the employer makes it worth their while.   By asserting our own power to provide for ourselves through healing nature, we effectively change government and business to become what we need them to be.

The Reinhabit Cooperative the Living Systems Institute is promoting is designed to be an organization that can carry our community into the future.  We are not concerned with existing business, government and religious organizations.  We humans can belong to more than one organization.  The problem that Reinhabit Cooperative seeks to address is the needs of all those individuals who are not being adequately served by those existing organizations.

In the world we want in the future every individual human will be able to obtain the things they need to thrive.  The things humans need to thrive are food, shelter, learning, health belonging and purpose.  Reinhabit Cooperative will produce those things for all those participating in it.

There are three sets of ideas we want to incorporate into the cooperative in order to address these needs.

The first set is the ideas about managing a common pool resource following the work of Elinor Ostrom.   We call the common pool resource available to a community biological potential.  Biological potential is all the participation that could be contributing to the well being of the community but is not.  Biological potential includes the potential contributions of the people who are unable to find a job paying a living wage.

The second set of ideas is those that Robert Kegan and Lisa Lahey call deliberately developmental organizations.  This set changes the employer/employee relationship in ways that foster the development of employee.  By giving employees the incentive to be constantly improving themselves, both developing skills and maturing, the organization becomes more effective at accomplishing its goals.

The third set of ideas is those Frederic Laloux calls “teal organizations’.  These are organizations that honor the humanity of the people doing the work by allowing them the authority to do the work in the right way.  These are also known as horizontal organizations and the process is described as “pushing decision making to the edges.”

The goal of managing a commons is to get the best use out of a resource in a sustainable and regenerative way.  The goal of a deliberately developmental organization is a structure that allows every individual to pursue their full potential.  The goal of a teal organization is a structure in which each participant can take responsibility for their contribution to the society.  We want to incorporate all three of these goals into Reinhabit Cooperative.

As we learn to understand how the world works we can begin to have hope for a better future.  Consider that there are four main subsystems to the world that we experience.  Each of these subsystems operates through a specific function.  We are created by these subsystems and by our actions we create them.  The future of the world is determined by the choices we make.  Here is how it works. 

As individual organisms we receive stimulus from the world around us and respond.  We seek to be fed, safe and loved.  This is true for every living organism.  It is true for every bacteria, every fungi, every plant and every animal.

Some of the stimuli we receive comes from the energy of the sun and the materials of the earth.  This is true for every living organism.  We all need the warmth of the sun, certain minerals and the wind and the water.

Some of the stimuli we receive comes from the pattern of living things in which we find ourselves.  Every living organism is doing the best it can with the information it has to navigate the pattern.  We move through the pattern to be fed, safe and loved.

The diagram shows the relationships within the pattern we are each trying to navigate to be fed, safe and loved.

Some species gather together with individuals of their kind as a strategy to help each other to be fed, safe and loved.  Birds form flocks, fish form schools, ants form colonies and lions form prides.  Each group is a pattern of communication.  The members of the group communicate about moving through the pattern of living things.  The human ability to communicate is the source of our success in the pattern and the hope for the future of the pattern.

These are the four subsystems that make up the world we experience.  Each subsystem has a different operation.

• Individual organisms grow and move about according to our DNA.
• The sun and the earth operate according to the laws of physics.
• The pattern of living things creates complex carbon based molecules and cycles them through itself.
• Groups of organisms operate by communicating among the members of the group.

When we learn to distinguish these four subsystems and how they operate, we begin to communicate about the state of the whole.  We begin to see how we individuals depend on the whole to be fed, safe and loved. We begin to work together in groups to contribute to the well being of the pattern of living things.

The next stage of evolution is taking place right now as groups of humans begin to communicate about the cycling of carbon through the pattern of living things.

Pat the Gardener will be offering the service of converting old fashioned landscapes into thriving habitats. Most potential clients will not be able to afford a permaculture design and installation costing thousands of dollars.  More likely, people interested in healing nature and producing abundance will want Pat’s assistance on a regular basis using small and slow steps to convert their landscape.

We will be able to ask potential clients to hire Pat as a way heal nature and produce the abundance.  It is a way that our community can come together to find a place for all our residents.

Let’s say that Pat charged $100.00 per month for the landscaping service. For that fee Pat would spend 4 hours a month. During the spring through planting season and after the first hard frost that might be a four hour block of time each month building gardens and planting. During the growing season that might be an hour a week to keep things looking neat. If Pat were to spend half of the available working hours providing this service there is a potential of 20 clients providing a base of $2,000 per month for ½ time work. The other half of Pat’s time would then be available to do different kinds of projects such as building greenhouses and chicken coops or major landscape renovations.

As the Cook and the Gardener Partnership (CGP) acquires additional clients and as the food truck sales increase they can begin a process of bringing on additional partners, developing the skills of these new partners and increasing the ability of CGP to provide food, shelter, learning, health, belonging and purpose to the partners.

The Living Systems Institute has been experimenting with the kind of small and slow steps that Pat will be using in this service. Following is an example of a project that took around four hours to complete.

This section of a garden at LSI was overgrown with grass.  We could also use this technique to reduce the amount of grass a client needs to water and mow.  The first step is a weed barrier of newspaper and/or cardboard.  The cardboard is tucked in around the plants we want to save and will smother the grasses and other plants in that space.

I happened to have the hay shown in the picture but the mulch could also be a combination of materials generated at the client’s site such as branches, trimmings and leaves or imported waste materials such as wood chips.  I used some bedding from my chicken coop to add a little nitrogen.

The plants in the wheel barrow are anchusa, heart leaf and astors that we thinned out of the Peggy Gates garden at the Eldridge Propagation Site. In that way, Pat can obtain the plants needed for new projects by thinning out gardens at other clients and get paid for both activities.  We can also participate in the High Plains Plant Propagation Cooperative as a way to obtain less common plants.

There are special techniques for planting in the deep mulch as shown in these pictures. The hay will rapidly shrink in thickness and the plants will spread to fill the space. We like the anchusa because it is long blooming for pollinators. We like the astors because they will bloom well into the fall. The heart leaf will fill the niche in a shady space within the garden. The spreading will be limited by the spread of the water from the drip system and by the pathway.

If some of Pat’s clients also invested in a chicken coop and greenhouse the weekly visit to maintain those systems can be combined with the landscape maintenance service.

With 20 clients we could begin thinking about renting a place for Pat and Chris to conduct the operations of CGP.  One approach would be to look for a large house on a lot zoned agricultural and begin the processes described in Vertically Integrated in Chickens.

If CGP had 10 landscape workers, with 20 clients each, CGP would have a base income of $20,000 a month before counting income from the sale of meals.  At that scale the food the landscapers will be producing can be a significant portion of those meals.

It is a complex idea with many moving parts.  Many of the details will have to be worked out as the partners acquire clients and other resources.  This is what it looks like for a community to come together to find a place for all its residents.

The object of discussion is life on this planet.

The subject is “the way humans produce the things they need and desire”.

The issues are:

  1) declining habitats

  2) increasing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere

  3) the inability to supply every human being with what they need to live/thrive

  4) humans doing violence to other humans

Life on this planet is a “system”. It is a pattern of interactions among individual actors each pursuing their genetic and memetic instructions. Every choice has consequences through out the system and at all scales.  Issues 1 through 4 result from the way humans produce the things they need and desire.

We humans tend to think of the interactions among ourselves, and in particular those interactions that involve the exchange of money, as the most important.  Keep in mind that human interactions are not possible without the participation of all the other living things around us.  The interactions among the living things on this planet produce the oxygen we breath, much of the water that falls as rain, all of the food we eat, the goods and services we buy and the information we use to navigate the world.

The most important single factor in sustaining life on earth is the conversion of sunlight into organic molecules.

The interactions that involve the exchange of money are merely a subset of all interactions among living things on this planet.  That is what I mean when I write that the economy is a part of the ecosystem.

The ecosystem is fractal.  At the scale of a hand full of soil the ecosystem is the interactions among the living things within that handful of soil.  Within a neighborhood the ecosystem is the interactions among the living things in the neighborhood . . . and so on . . .

Life on this planet is the interactions among the living things on this planet.

Following this idea requires a shift in thinking from the economy being something separate from the ecosystem to the economy being just one part of the ecosystem.  We see these relationships:

  a) Individual humans participate in organizations in order to obtain something that they need or desire,

  b) All the individual organisms and their organizations within a place create an ecosystem composed of all the interactions among all the participants.

  c) Organisms and organizations exist because the ecosystem delivers what they need to survive, and the corollary, no organism or organization can exist unless it receives what it needs from its ecosystem.

  d) This pattern of relationships exists at the scale of soil and at the scale of planet and at all scales in between.

This is the critical point for understanding our individual role in creating the ecosystem. Every individual finds themselves in a pattern of interactions created by all individual organisms seeking out what they need and desire. These interactions create a flow of things the actors need.  The flows through the pattern are fueled by the conversion of sunlight into organic molecules.

Our choices can increase the capacity of life to convert sunlight into organic molecules or we can continue to decrease that capacity.

The only thing any of us really controls is the choice of how we will seek out what we need and desire. That is the only way we can change “the way humans produce the things they need and desire”.

When a volcano makes new ground, the potential for life to convert sunlight into organic molecules on that new ground is near zero. The dirt and seeds that blow in will support a few hardy plants in the beginning. The decomposing bodies of this year’s plants support the growth of more plants the next cycle. Cycle over cycle life will approach what is known as a climax community of organisms. We can think of this process as approaching the potential for life to convert sunlight into organic molecules.

The cycling of the molecules support an increase in capacity cycle over cycle.  It is this build up of fertility that allows life to grow more plants that convert more sunlight over time.

The way humans produce the things they need and desire can diminish the potential of life to convert sunlight into organic molecules.  We do that by interfering with the cycling of molecules.  Let’s look at how increasing the production of organic molecules addresses issues 1 through 4.

   1) declining habitats

To increase the capacity of life to convert sunlight means that we are rebuilding complex patterns of interactions among plants, animals, fungi and bacteria. That is rebuilding habitats.

   2) increasing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere

As we increase the capacity of life to convert sunlight we increase the carbon tied up in living organisms. As those molecules cycle they will be stored in the soil as the basis for the fertility that supports plant life. This is how we will abate climate change.

    3) the inability to supply every human being with what they need to live/thrive

A thriving polyculture in the spaces on earth that are now barren can produce the food and fiber humans need to survive. We can engage those humans without a job in creating this food and fiber. That will create a place in the system for every human. Together we can create the food, clothing, shelter, learning, health, belonging and purpose that will allow every human being to thrive.

   4) humans doing violence to other humans

As we create a place in the system for those humans that do not fit in the market, we remove the justification for those without to do violence as a way to obtain what they need.

Imagine being in the middle of an industrial corn field after harvest.

If the farmer is using best practices they will have their terraces in and the ground will be littered with chopped corn stalks from the combine.

Now imagine all the organisms that could be living in that space but are not. Next year’s soy beans don’t count. All of the things necessary for next year’s crop still have to be imported. Without those imports the only thing that will grow next year are a few glyphosate resistant weeds. Producing crops for sale in the market has diminished the capacity of life to convert sunlight into organic molecules in this space.

We can think of the difference between the capacity of life to convert sunlight in that corn field compared to its capacity if it had a full range of species participating as unrealized biological potential. The unrealized biological potential of this planet is immeasurable.

There is one set of ecological limits if we rely exclusively on the market to produce what humans need and desire. There is a different set of ecological limits if we begin to tap into the unrealized biological potential of the planet to produce the things humans need to thrive.

Activists concerned with resource depletion often speak of “excessive consumption” as the cause.  However, the manufacture of big screen TVs, for example, has a nominal impact on the capacity of life to convert sunlight into organic molecules. The impact of many “consumer goods” is related to toxins in the waste stream.

The bigger impact is from the way we produce food, clothing and shelter. It is these activities that reduce the complexity of interactions within the space taken up by the activity.  Industrial farming for food and fiber, the resulting desertification and the construction of barren work and housing spaces diminish the capacity of life to convert sunlight much more than the things people buy to fit inside their homes.

The things humans need to thrive (food, clothing, shelter, learning, health, belonging and purpose) can be produced within a complex pattern of interactions that retains the capacity to convert sunlight at a high level. But not through a process that harvests products for sale in the market.

All the other things that humans might desire are suited for production and sale through the market.

The point of this blog is that increasing the capacity of life to convert sunlight is the only way to create a sustainable ecosystem that includes humans.  As with the new ground from the volcano, it takes the organic molecules cycling through the ecosystem.  We can begin to reclaim the capacity of life to convert sunlight in all those spaces where it has been diminished.  It will take individuals investing their discretionary time and money in a pattern of interactions that builds up organic molecules.

There is nothing we can demand of the 1%, or change we can make to finance or banking that will realize the potential of life to convert sunlight into organic molecules.

It will take individual human beings building new habitats for themselves and sharing how to do it with their friends and neighbors.  All the other claims about what must be done to create a sustainable system is sound and fury signifying nothing,

It is common for people to believe that “the market can solve all our problems”. That means that the answer is always more market activity.

   1) Money does not flow except in the exchange of market value.

   2) A thing that is abundant has no market value.

   3) The things we want to be abundant are food, clothing, shelter, learning, health, belonging and purpose.

   4) Increasing market activity cannot produce an abundance of those things.

The market, exchange, and specialization is how we see things. But doing more of that only gets us more of issues 1 through 4.

The market only allows the production of things that are scarce for people with the money to pay for them.  This is the law of supply and demand and we cannot wish it away.  The law says that we cannot produce abundance.  Because we rely almost exclusively on the market to produce what we need and desire we have created the issues 1 through 4.

The market is not the only way to produce things.

There is an alternative that we can pursue in addition to market transactions.

For most of human existence small groups of people produced everything they needed for themselves in cooperation with the living organisms that shared their ecosystem. That process is still available to us if we are not blind to it.

The diagram shows a bounded network of organisms cycling carbon internally. It is floating in a sea of market interactions. In “Embedded in Nature” I called this a cell of sustainability. When Chris and Pat start CP Foods they will be creating a cell of sustainability.

Just as an aid to shift your focus . . . consider that cycling resources and exchanging resources are two different and incompatible things. But we can be doing some of each.

In this crowd sourced narrative, Chris the cook and Pat the gardener form CP Foods. The partnership’s goal is to become vertically and horizontally integrated in the production of food, shelter, learning, health, belonging and purpose (the things humans need to thrive).

They will need to engage in market transactions in order to obtain funds to invest in the capacity to produce the things they will consume internally.

The basic transaction is a further partnership with individual homeowners in the community. The homeowner will put up the money and Pat will build a greenhouse and chicken coop that will produce protein and fresh vegetables year round . . . for ever . . .

CP Foods and the homeowner co-own and divide among themselves everything that is produced.  It is the cycling of organic molecules within CP Foods and its partnerships that increases the capacity of life to convert sunlight.  CP Foods benefits through the increase in the production of organic molecules.  There is no need for a medium of exchange for these “internal” interactions.

This is how we avoid the market limitation on the production of abundance.

Communities coming together to create a place for all their residents is how we realize the potential for life to convert sunlight into organic molecules and build a sustainable culture.

Pat and Chris are interested in greenhouse technologies in order to offer their clients a year round supply of food.  Here are some of the findings from their research.

People eating on a budget, or living in a food desert*, are typically missing protein and fresh vegetables from their diet.  This is particularly true during the winter in temperate zones and particularly for those without access to space to grow their own vegetables (or who don’t use the space they have).  In order to avoid going hungry when money is scarce people concentrate on starches that keep well and are relatively inexpensive such as pasta, rice, beans and potatoes.  For those in a food desert, prepared foods at convenience stores using “snap”** benefits may be the only reasonable choice for food.  Both approaches are missing the nutrition provided by proteins and fresh vegetables.

If we can build a space that will not freeze over the winter, we can grow fresh greens year round for ourselves.  These vegetables can have a higher nutrient density than those shipped long distance and grown in monocultures using pesticides and chemical fertilizers.  Nutrient density is achieved by maintaining whole soil ecosystems within the space as a growing medium.  Once the space is built, it can operate at little or no cost if we incorporate enough thermal mass to prevent freezing.  The formula for that thermal mass is 5 gallons of water or equivalent for each square foot of glazing.

These structures have been built attached to dwellings with the benefit that power and water can come directly from the dwelling.  As a stand alone structure we can look at a solar panel and battery to run the pumps, fans and lights.  For city water, it will be necessary to filter out the chloramines used to kill pathogens in the water supply as these will be toxic to fish.  In that case we will want to have additional storage for filtered water.

We can maintain a whole soil ecosystem to provide the nutrients by integrating plant, animal, fungal and bacterial processes within the space.  We can also use the water that is required for thermal mass as a aquaponics system to grow fish and additional vegetables.  In aquaponics the ammonia produced by the fish is converted to nitrates that can be used by the plants.  We can supply the remaining nutrients by using worm castings to hold the plants in the flow of water.  We can also use worm castings in the growing beds.  Because of the integrated processes the structure is now more than a greenhouse.  We call it a food cell as in a membrane enclosing biological processes resulting in food for humans.

We can produce the worm casting by feeding chicken bedding to the worms and keep the worm bins under the growing bed.  Because there is no floor in this design we can grow additional worms in the pathways.  We can feed the worms to the fish and the chickens.

The growing beds can be filled with wood chips in a process similar to our deep mulch gardens.  The worm castings will carry the soil organisms we need to create the soil ecosystem which will create plant nutrients as it processes the wood.

This system will produce enough fresh vegetables to supply the needs of a typical suburban household plus a surplus that CP Foods can use both to feed the partners and to prepare meals for the food truck.  The protein can be provided by chickens (eggs and meat) in an associated coop and through the fish that will be produced.

CP Foods can form a partnership with individual homeowners with space to build a food cell and chicken coop.  The homeowner will provide the daily maintenance of feeding the chickens and fish and collecting the eggs.  CP Foods will visit the site weekly to maintain the system, harvest what needs harvesting, replant, etc.  The homeowner and CP Foods will share the produce.

The design of the chicken coop for a typical suburban household will be the subject of a different blog. 

*A food desert is a place where the grocery chains are too far away to be able to obtain fresh foods.  That can be a short distance for people relying on public transportation because of the limited amount that they can buy at one time and carry home.

**SNAP is the US government Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program.