Food Chain

by Dan Hemenway

The most times we eat on a given batch of photosyntheses, not the leeast, is the most efficient. So if our manure feeds mushrooms and their spent spawn feeds earthworms and the earthworms feed fish while the spawn goes on to feed plants, and the fish feed people with their offal going to chickens and the chickens and the chickens produce eggs, feathers, manure (to push back up to the mushroom part of the cycle again) and flesh as well as say turbulence, CO2 and heat in a greenhouse as well as some pest control, well that is way smarter than a stupid, yes I say stupid compost pile to grow one's tomatoes. We've had spiders that eat scorpions, way up on the food "chain" (in the limited linear way of looking at matters) and we are very happy for the service. If a chicken eats such a spider, well there'll be more spiders. So we get scorpions in our food chain. Very satisfying.

Efficiency is eating at every step of the chain, and looping the trophic exchanges round and round more time than it takes to drive a mad macrameist madder. So I can eat lettuce (my idea of a nothing food) and the steer who clears my land and the egg and the chicken and everything that they eat. And when the pulse of abundance is in the plus phase I eat more flesh, and particularly more flesh that eats critters, and when the pluse has a minus sign, I eat lots of critters early on and then what they were eating later in the cycle, trying like hell to hold on to my breeding stock. All the while the critters and their various positions in the loops of energy and nutrient accumulation are serving other functions, so that I work a whole lot less than a vegetarian, which I sometimes become, when I eat the eaters. The whole plus and minus cycle can be annual in cold temperate climates. When I lived in such we were virtually vegetarian + eggs + wild fish in summer and ate concentrated meat when there was no longer vegetation to feed it in winter. It was also easier to slaughter and store then without added facilities other than cold weather. Slaughter a beef, skin, gut and split it, and next morning it is frozen, no files. Dogs and chickens work at the frozen ofal well into the winter.

So the cycles of nutrient excange need to be responsive to other cycles and our job is to be in there throwing the switches that move our critters from one feed to another and/or to the freezer or frying pan. it is fun.

Economics is not one thing. Worldwide, we have had (at least) two major economics philosophies--economics of scarcity (capitialism, communism, socialism, feudalism, impirialism in general, etc.) and economics of abundance. In scarcity, we impose certain laws on ourselves, so that we see abundant resources as of low value and scarce resources as of high value. ("Law" of supply and demand.) This results in cascading pressure on limited resources as they become scarcer & scarcer, eg the consumption of rainforests (and other forests) by the global cash economy. Value is conferred by transfer and control is the ultimate end goal.

In the economics of abundance, all Creation is of a high value (sacred). I've never seen this economics pursued outside of a spiritual context. Abundance is regarded as a gift to be used, wisely not profligately. Scarcity also is perceived, but as a responsibility, not a resource. Scarce or endangered entities (deliberately avoiding the term "resources") are our responsibility to protect. Both abundant and threatened entities are gifts from the Universe and are consumed with appreciation and respect, or protected in the same frame of mind, as appropriate. In consonance with your denial of homocentricity, people are equally gifts to these other resources and have specific responsibilities to them. Control is a joke--in this philisophy it is clear to us that we are not in charge, even one little bit, except of what we do with our gifts. Attempting control in a broader sphere always results in unanticipated consequences and so is the anthesis of control. Value is not regarded as transfer so much as transformation--all elements of creation being responsible to transfer what comes to them according to their intrinsic (given) natures. Conscious entities, such as people, need to consciously do this. Correct transformation is not merely process but also timing and location--four dimensional at a minimum--so that we transform in the right place at the right time, to bring us round to one of Bill's favorite phrases.

Your post straddles these two value systems. Well many of us try this, as it is difficult to live in a context without following its dominant patterns, however distasteful. So we try to make money doing the right thing and, I guess, the test comes when we reach a point where they diverge and we must choose.

For Mother Earth,
Dan Hemenway, Yankee Permaculture Publications (since 1982)

We don't have time to rush.