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Rural System? Just Dreaming …
A For-Profit Conglomerate for
Meaningful Jobs
Healthful Communities
and Improved Natural Resource Management ©
by Robert H. Giles, Jr., Ph.D.
Professor Emeritus
Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, Virginia
2007
Part 1 - What was behind creating the system
Chapter 1. The Origins and a Sketch
Dreams: Hundreds of cows, randomly distributed, red brutes, all staring, drooling… Around and around the mountains they trudge beneath the high walls left by the strip miners… eating and eating and eating grass… but where are the turnips? I know nothing of turnips, or cattle, or goats, and the high walls are my limits, but from them I soar. Why do the bantam's feathers shine purple, turnips are only half purple, and the night is purple…Just dreaming …
| Why Rural System is being proposed, what it might be able to do (even though there are doubts), the elements of the diffierences between it and current practices such as insourcing. |
Insights from the Coalfield
"Clarify objectives," I had taught my students. I'd been a professor in a state university for 35 years. During that time I did the things necessary to get a research and development grant that would fund graduate student work and that would answer some interesting questions. I thought I had clarified my objectives in the early 1990's when I took the literal question of a contract project as my objective. That question was: "What should we do with our 69,000 acres of mined land when the coal is gone?" I worked on that question with graduate students for several years. I remember the day and the chill feeling when I discovered that it was the wrong question.
Coal as a valuable commodity does not just run out of an ownership. It runs out of a region. It runs out of value for a time. I had my eyes on the single (but large) property and the question seemed real. I was studying trees, crops, and "things" to do. I was hot on the trail of a well-designed farm, computer-enhanced, and perfectly located on the after-mining lands.
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I was too intent upon solving the problem; I lost sight of my principle. I did not have clear objectives (Chapter 7). I sought the great farm, then to duplicate it. My awareness grew almost daily of linkages, of outside influences, of diverse owners with diverse objectives. Agencies pumped spurts of money into the region for its people while outside forces extracted resources and wealth on a conveyor belt without an apparent glance at people around them and their needs … or what would keep the belts turning. The mining mentality was profound. It was one of getting and leaving. There seemed no concern for stability of a system, of maintenance, of sustaining work, even of the human workers that were needed for extracting the last of the coal and certainly not for those who might work the land for whatever else might be produced on it.
I admit that I worked in gloom. I needed solutions and I looked for them but I fell under my analogy. I kept seeing the coal region (some seven counties in southwestern Virginia) as a system, even as a human body. I saw my study-area as well as other similar areas as organs of that body. Perhaps it was the wrong analogy, but I was trapped by it. The more intently I studied the property, the more unlikely it became that I would see the flaw in what I eventually learned: a well, vigorous organ could not, should not be placed and restored within a troubled, unhealthy body.
Around the world there are rural areas with human problems. Mining areas are commonly affected. The coal is almost gone. The manufacturing plants have shut in some areas. Lumber mills have shut in many small communities; most of the large and so-called virgin trees for wide lumber are gone. North American Indians continue to wrestle with life on some lands. Tobacco markets are down and allotments no longer available. Much land is too steep for crops or livestock and the soil, some ruined, is now in perilous condition. Laws and subsidies change costs and profits over night; prices in the stores do not reflect production costs. Markets for crops, meats, or dairy products are like TV splashes; on the farm we can't change plant and animal growth rates fast enough to respond to such rapid changes in demand on small land holdings. Imported products produced under conditions that are illegal in the states, are subsidized by taxpayers. There is limited access to ample, safe water and adequate sanitation. There are wide-spread infectious diseases; unreliable precipitation patterns exacerbated by global warming; underdeveloped roads, storage facilities and irrigation systems; and ongoing conflicts, both large and small. Prize crops throughout the world (tea, coffee, tobacco, and bananas) change in price, use, or acceptability and the people that planted, grew, and harvested them are yanked to and fro by the changes.
The changes coincided with the fall of the Berlin wall, NAFTA, the European Monetary Union, GATT, the collapse of Communism, new wars, the loss of many travel and trade barriers, the passage of many environmental laws and regulations, awareness of global warming, the emergence of knowledge about "green gold," and the rise of the Internet and e-commerce. Not just jobs in mining but jobs everywhere are being rapidly transformed, downsized, streamlined, or made obsolete by technology. There are shifts required in life because of changing buying power and the high costs of life-sustaining medicine and the perceived needs for medical treatment (vs. problem prevention). Outsourcing of work is a new dominant. The questions are the same. What do we do? Where do we go? Some people answer while plunging into poverty; some climb into comfort and apathy. What can be our future?
For thoughtful people (since no one can believe the expected horrors and sense at the same time the opportunities of the near-future condition) the question is: Tired now, how do we get ready for the next big change. For example, what do we do before the coal runs out? Before fossil energy or phosphorus is available only at very high price? What can we do?
The coal (or similar resource or its manufacture such as textiles, furniture, and iron), by analogy) has already run out in many areas. People have exploited the resources (fish, oil, gas, trees, water, and soil fertility) and the land is left behind. Some people never got ahead so didn't notice that they were behind. The rural population totals still increase, but they are far behind urban population growth. The US nation is now about 80% urban and so about 20% of the children of the US are in rural areas …14 million of them are in need of education, protection, relief from hours in school buses, and their accidents prevented. On May 23, 2007, was the first time in human history when more people in the world lived in cities than in the country. Populations of rural children bother me and my family-inspired senses of fairness, being "kind," and pledges of "justice for all." The land and the small communities that remain are in trouble; the people that see their struggle are in pain. Averting the gaze from little children who suffer can cause pain. Everyone suffers.
It would seem that government (based on lessons from my youth-year "civics" classes and many after that) should be able to help. Large scale problems are theirs to address. Now that premise is in doubt. Members of local boards are stressed. People who are on the move in troubled areas rarely produce many votes for regional legislators. Loyalty to "place" shrinks when each family moves out. Agency staffs are now (and still likely to be) reduced in size, inadequate to address the complexities of most sites. They are totally unable to visit the thousands of private and public farm sites throughout a region of the state needing specific, prolonged, thoughtful attention. People in trouble have no resources to help themselves. They cannot afford consultants' advice or to invest in taking what they get. They are in trouble! They need help from outside. Agency interest or delivery of services, influenced by leadership, funds, and political pressure, seems to become more fickle each day. The university professor expected to "do science," now lives with no funds to develop a research program in an era of unplanned and uncertain grants and contracts. Young rofessors are far removed from the farm and practical connections become less likely in their teaching or studies. There has to be a better way than begging or waiting for nearly-random gifts to solve pieces of the problem, solutions that never quite fit together in the picture-puzzle.
There are no acceptable answers for inquiring people who know and love a place, have family roots, and have advanced age in a discriminating, youth-loving society. There is no clear place to which to move to gain the advances displayed nightly on TV. Everything seems "full-up," pricey, too new, and very uncertain. "What to do?" is the question repeated in despair. Not profane, they ask, "What in hell are we to do?!"
The answers are especially critical to the total rural environment. There are about 1.3 billion acres of privately owned rural land, 60% of the nation. Of these acres, 850 million of them are classified as forests and rangeland. There are a mere 2 million family farms left. Forty-four percent of farm land is now owned by non-farmers suggesting a major shift in knowledge about the land but a shift that obscures concerns and potential investments for the land and its productivity. In Virginia, for example, 60% of the 25.4 million acres of the state are in commercial timberland. Of that, 80% is privately owned (not federal, not industrial). The state has a $3.3 billion tourism and travel expenditures enterprise …and 15% of the entire work force of the state (248,000 people) depends on the forests…yet most such land remains unmanaged and with harvests unsupervised. The highly valued tobacco crop has lost its value and farmers of those special lands and traditions now seek an alternative crop …just anything (but within their financial requirements) to stay on the land of their parents. The rural lands and the people who feel responsible for them in some way are under intense pressures. These pressures include the uncertainties of residential development, costs of new services, changes in the beauty of the landscape, loss of a sense of place for many, conflicts between energy and water uses, continuing soil erosion and its consequences, and changing wildlife populations, some being threatened, others becoming so abundant as to become pests, stock killers, and to harbor diseases.
Over my time in the coal-field, my studies of the land and what to do with it broadened with understanding, but I kept my emphasis on individual projects which I imagined as the super-farm, a cybernetic wonder. It finally dawned upon me that "the farm" was not the best system for analysis. The system of concern was a specific enterprise or major activity such as grape growing, forestry, cattle, etc. These were to become the units (called "groups") of a large enterprise or conglomerate, one that was "vertically integrated." Links among groups were evident, but I developed these for payoffs, not just general interest. I selected units that could augment others and provide employment during slow or "down" times. In selecting units and designing the system, I used throughout, a rule that the work, whatever I considered, had to have the potentials of being supportive of or contributing to pooled profits.
The Football Analogy
Like the morning sun streaming through a cabin window, a working analogy appeared to me between American football and the natural resource system. I had been watching the leather football on the playing field. It was the name of the game and was of centralizing importance. Like my error in thinking about the farm, I had been thinking about a product or commodity. I needed to use the analogy of football, but not it as the ball but as the enterprise. The football enterprise is very large and diverse. It includes uniforms, the stadium, food, drink, clothing, advertising, grounds, publications, fan clubs, and more. The ball is important, but, compared to the greater football enterprise, it is almost irrelevant. By analogy, each tree or the wild animal of the forest is essential, but in the context of a total regional viable rural economic land use system, each entity is almost irrelevant. Perhaps people in forestry or wildlife management and closely related activities have had their "eye of the ball" too long. Perhaps just attracting visitors (as in ecotourism) or producing more wild animals has not served well and that it is now time to concentrate on a total rural and natural resource enterprise (or more specifically the enterprise-profits, those from beautiful productive land, catering, lodging, equipment, products, organizations, guides, etc., etc.)
By analogy with football, when it comes to the regional problems, we have talked about "ball handling" too long. We have talked about trees, about fish, and complained about environmental regulations. We've been "brought up" to ask for government help. We can ask for help, but that has not been and may not be forthcoming. We have lost our muscle as quiescent beggars and there has been little change after 50 years of spending the relatively little money that has been provided. We are in the grip of all of the limitations of the single "cottage industry." We have rarely pondered the potentials of an integrated regional enterprise. We have been independent landowners! We can be independent ... and lose something we hold in common, the vital county. We need some group work. The team as in football is essential for success and that can be measured in the clear objective of profitability (now obscure or lost for many public resource agencies).
The Enterprise
A concept slowly emerged for me of a new enterprise, a large diverse conglomerate of for-profit, private businesses, mostly related to the rural areas. It includes forests, wilderness areas, lakes, streams, rangelands or pastures, and fallow fields and small communities - all under the word "rural" or "rural land." (There is no good inclusive word; my emphasis is simply away from the household and service structures and yards. "Urban" was a similarly difficult word with a host of very different problems.) I learned very late (and fear that few students are being given, or getting, the message) that reasonable managers include all of their land units when buying and selling land, paying for insurance, and filing tax forms. Keeping things separate, for example, doing economic analyses of forests as if they were not part of the annual total economic picture of the private landownership, is patently wrong.
The farm is not the step to the solution, not a single high-value commodity production unit, not even a list of superior farms! The solution is a conglomerate, a single system of many parts or subsystems. The parts are commodity or service units, special separate enterprises, all working together. The objective is profits, not "farming" or yields of fish or board feet of lumber. Thus gains are to be made on the property as well as off of it, and the profits need to be responsive to existing or potential markets not necessarily on the ownership, or clusters of ownerships, but within the region. Later, after the Internet arose, I realized: "within the world."
The conditions, as I saw them, were that the parts or the entire enterprise need not be "blue-chip." It had to be reasonable (at least a bank-rate return on investments, because there were many surplus payoffs from staying on the land); and the plan should include the prospects for sustained modest profits over a planning period of at least 150 years. The conditions, the design limits generally included increasing employment, increasing rural community stability, reducing tax drains, increasing land value, creating a profitable system for managing human environments for diverse high-quality lives, and participating effectively in globalization (Friedman 1999, 2005).
The needed system I called Rural System. I've generally described to interested people what it is and what it does.
It's a conglomerate corporation. It has four main parts.
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| Fig. 1.1. The tetrahedron symbolizing the system, the four main parts are at the vertices and the lines symbolize the relationships. |
Other people pressed for what it does differently than the common business. I said that Rural System is a single system that provides the above advantages by providing in one integrated and synergistic unit:
I soon gave up trying to answer questions for there was never enough time. I developed the "elevator speech" and a one-page capsule for mailing. I also took the advice of several quizzical listeners: "Just tell me a story about it" (Chapter 2).
It's an enterprise to provide employment, stabilize rural villages, and improve natural resource management. That's its objective. Its measure of performance is profit.
I know that Rural System is needed but not how to get it started. The design (Chapters 3 and 4) can be evaluated in several ways but only properly after it is implemented. Rural System may be modified, but it seems now to be the only alternative that will allow people to live in the major depressed regions of the US and elsewhere independently, allow land values to be retained, and allow the land to produce useful goods, services, and other benefits. It will enable rural lands and their people to contribute cost effectively to their own good and to that of the people of the state, and eventually the Nation, perhaps Earth. It's a way toward to a major transformational change in private land management designed to provide benefits.
Work toward creating and operating Rural System is an effort to join with others in tasks of conservation, eco-development, nature protection and enhancement, and rural economic development. In the World Conservation Strategy, other have said
"Humans, in their quest for economic development and enjoyment of the riches of nature, must come to terms with the reality of resource limitation and the carrying capacity of ecosystems, and must take account of the needs of future generations. This is the message of conservation. For if the object of development is to provide for social and economic welfare, the object of conservation is to ensure Earth's capacity to sustain development and to support all life."
Rural System demonstrates the blending of ecological, economic, cultural, social, esthetic, energetic, and enforcement principles to achieve productive rural lands into the long-term future. Forests and other land use categories (e.g., ponds, pastures, fallow fields) are designed and managed by it to produce, dynamically, diverse benefits for society and customers and sustained profits (within bounds) over a long time for the owner.
Rural System is a concept as well as an enterprise. The conglomerate corporation involves itself with the vast rural, natural resources of regions of Virginia and nearby areas, a region with fuzzy boundary. It provides a computer-aided, year-around, profitable entrepreneurial response to an array of current opportunities on private lands there. (It will franchise later.) The corporation concentrates on conventional agriculture, diverse outdoor recreation and tourism, as well as forest and wildlife management. It works on private land restoration, enhancement, and production (often lands of absentee owners). It also involves within its profit-making mix over 80 small, unified, enterprises (called groups) that are not traditionally included within agriculture. Two-thirds of these business units work from the managed lands that are called Rural System Tracts. It uses the National Forests and other public lands with permission.
Over one-third of the proposed groups do not work directly on the land and are marginally natural-resource related. All financial gains and losses are accumulated within the conglomerate for proportional distributions within it and to land owners, members, and communities. A central administrative and leadership unit provides incubator-like services and allows the corporation to harvest public research investments, to achieve economies of scale and division of labor, and to stabilize employment. A Land Force, the field staff, provides the wide variety of services needed for Rural System Tracts.
The enterprise links citizens as well as visitors to the land and its long-term potentials for profits. It creates a regional identity, one of a place for sophisticated modern natural resource management. It links buyers and users with producers of certified forest products and rural land resource opportunities that result in sustained profits. Successes are achieved via specialized work, value-added strategies, synergistic designs, diverse enterprises and products, and computer optimization of a total system. It is private and non-governmental and that makes it very unusual, perhaps unique in modern local business and rare within natural resource fields. It overcomes the old failures of natural resource management, i.e., diseconomies of small-scale operations and lack of diversity. An answer to a common questions: it does not "sell game," and is not a green, organic, biomimicry,or permaculture look-alike (though it may have elements of these.
What Rural System tries to do at its most fundamental level is to produce benefits for people. The benefits to landowners and customers are not the classical "goods and services" of economics literature but a special set of benefits. No other word than "benefits holds the ideas so well. These classes are:
Money is the index to these benefits. It is the system performance measure. The index is fully recognized as being an approximation to the real measure, and easily discussed as inaccurate, probably variable. Money is the means for the corporation to evaluate how well it is achieving its objective which is bounded expected present-discounted net gains - for rural people and their communities. Continued success depends upon land enhancement in the present, and then ongoing sophisticated management.
Structurally Rural System is a for-profit corporation (later with non-profit foundation) selling goods and services, with over 80 groups, an economizing central administration with high technology, a trained rural labor force, and custom contract work with many private landowners.
As a concept (2007), some will say it is hardly more than a set of ideas about maintaining or restoring productivity and in some cases approaching maximum productivity, but only within the context of reasonable profits for an almost unreasonable planning period. (There are few places where we even know what this potential productivity is for over 150 years.) Others will see that there is more available and being discovered.
Passing Doubt
Negative people can see why any business proposal or set of ideas will fail. An evil person can usually cause a failure in anything. So can incompetence or a natural catastrophe. So too can the convergence of a few minor but deadly destructive forces. The bet has to be made that these will not occur or that, better yet, structures and processes can be invented and created that reduce their chances or mortal effects within the rural environment. Without planning and involving deeply the people within the region, failure seems assured. Failures come in many forms. I doubt that I may be seeing a solution for a problem that does not exist. Maybe I'm one of those "glass-half-empty" guys. Maybe the solutions already in place have a positive trajectory and I just have to give them some time to "hit."
These are real doubts and negative feelings that I share, willing to hear convincing argument, but I continue in the face of the odds. The following chapters outline means to avoid failure. The counter odds I find in national and international documents and in the eyes of children that I have met where I think the messages and practices described herein can work some day.
When you stand on a wooden footbridge in the rain and the stream rushes a bubbling torrent of mud and branches at you, you lose sight of regions and their problems. The problem is immediate, personal, very local, and usually lasting. It is difficult to adjust attention to the broad problems of the state and national economy that affects all aspects of life, usually much later, when region-scale problems rush at you. Policies constructed far away influence state and provincial debt, high costs of health care, and demands for public inputs to decisions. Such inputs now approach anarchy. (We will never again build large public structures, certainly not cathedrals, because the voices for doing so are too diverse, dissonant, and the environment is too litigious.) Not only have the traditional problems of soil, forests, game, fish, and scenery been deprived of their funding bases, but new pressures and demands have arisen from more people, with more money in some sectors (less in others) demanding more services and facilities, in shorter periods. Civil conversations falter, marriages and thus socializing family influences fail, and society is over 80% urban with no prior, prolonged rural or outdoor experience and associated language or knowledge.
"The environment," selectively the rural environment, is an arena for significant concern and much work. Quality of life is a giant umbrella concept under which many different people cluster (Chapter 9) but it catches the essence of my concern. There is slippage and it needs to stop, at least be slowed. We have to scrap doubts (such as I said above to be open to discussion) and scholarly cautions and act as if we know that we have a set of problems that will not disappear and that are not likely to decline without active work. There are clear current economic problems, but environmental problems also abound. Most of these can be perceived as costs for us all, at least losses. The World Bank estimates the costs of environmental degradation are 4 to 8 percent of gross domestic product annually. We have to stop that locally. These problems are related, and solutions in one area nest well within the other. In The Saskatchewan Environmental Agenda: Securing a Sustainable Future it was said "…it is not possible to have a healthy economy or society in the long term without a healthy environment." Those authors, unlike others using "health" and "sustainable" ambiguously, developed environmental policies intended to have an impact on human health. Health has clear monetary dimensions and it, along with plusses and minuses of other rural dimensions, can be summarized cautiously as part of our sought-after positive net financial gains.
A Response to the Problems
I know the major environmental problems are linked to problems of employment and those to community stability and the quality of life that small communities can offer. I have reasonable doubt that I can solve them. It is easy to feel powerless, just at the thought of so many large needs over such large areas. I have done conventional things, thinking that I might have some influence, have a piece of the active solution. I gave 30 public lectures in one year on human population control. One listener at the end of one of these confessed that the plight of children bothered him but when sexually involved, he was always sure he could take care of "a world of them." I've done Earth Day things. I've taught university classes for 40 years (about 3600 lectures), published about 200 papers and books, and worked with over 55 superior graduate students, and confess that not much evident environmental improvement seems to have been made during my life, certainly not as a result of my efforts. I've studied the literature of conservation education and extension, including its great activity during the 1930's. Not much has changed since then in terms of improved land use … and losses now increase. (Small conspicuous exceptions do not refute my claim.) I certainly acknowledge some successes in water, air, and waste treatment, not only for their direct as well as secondary effects. Not being ungrateful, I still search for the net effects. Efforts and organizations and policies all change. I know there will be technological breakthroughs and related advances. I have had my eyes on human populations, industrial pollution, endangered plant and animal species, stream sediments, water quality of the Chesapeake Bay and California estuaries, region-wide ground water depletion and pollution, and unstable forest yields of this nation that were impinging world forests. I had done GIS maps of the likely coastline of Virginia following glaciers melting. Availability and distribution of limited supplies of cropland fertilizers seems to me to be a problem so large that it cannot be seen but for its dark shadow. Available fossil fuels for human activity, including producing fertilizers, seem so perilous that, like the death of a matriarch, it cannot be thought of, certainly not "thought through." Warming careens Earth to unthinkable change and complexity. These all feed my doubt, but they are the challenge. They can be bested by logic, knowledge, computer power, and strategic work within a planned enterprise in a capitalist society.
The universities and public education falter. Survival knowledge is missing. "Universal public education" still results in counties with over 50 percent of their citizens without a high school degree. The number of superior schools drops off as poverty increases. Poverty is not an excuse for low performance, only a condition. The myth of the rational citizen prevails, for that has been the objective of the university and its failure cannot be accepted. Democracy fails everywhere that the people are not educated and understand it fully. "Much of the world lives in poverty - the world is splitting apart. The growing social divide can make continued global economic development impossible if it is not rectified" (Hawken 1993: 118; Hart 2005).
However unsure, I'm sure that Rural System can help get it rectified … surely only partially, but at least with an effect that would allow a statistician to claim there to be a positive significant difference. It is a concept that may aspire to some small leadership, probably like Churchill's definition, "going from failure to failure without loosing enthusiasm." History suggests that a small effect is all that I can reasonably expect. But history was short of ideas, technology, and awareness of the perils of continuing as in the past. I want monumental success. What we have been doing is not working. It costs too much, and the amount we spend is not enough. What are we to do? What are we to do!? In the face of such grave problems, before so many people, over such vast areas, with such immediate needs … what are we to do?
We need a new pattern of thought and approach, an alternative structure for old things, for surely all in the past in not "bad." We need a modern holistic systems approach to sophisticated profit-oriented rural resource management. (Someone else may work with the cities.) I'm trying to get it started. Maybe it will be an idea that will unleash energy for making changes. I continue to try to describe it herein and at www.RuralSystem.com. I thought Rural System might have been started by now (2007) and so, often sorrowful over my failure, I write my dream of what it might have been. I try again here just to share the concepts and my design so that the flaws can be found and eventually something good can emerge… for the good of people in the vicinity of Virginia, USA, and eventually throughout the world. Earth is good …and people are intrinsically good … and now is a good time. We can act as if we believe…or dream that.
I have seen pictures of historical giant tulip poplar trees and oaks so large as to be almost unbelievable. I believe that, with management, they can be seen again. In only a few places they can be afforded because, past a point, gains in wood of specified high quality are not profitable. Tree volume, wood quality, and the monetary value of the standing log become stable, and then eventually decline. Rural System staff will typically work with all of the benefits of all trees of a "stand" or similar group of trees. In each stand, the total actual and potential value to the owner is evaluated. While wood value may decline in a very old stand, the floral or faunal complex may produce esthetic, recreation, tourism, bird watching or other benefits and thus delaying harvest may be very appropriate. (Even though there is financial loss in wood value, the net probable financial gains made from the delay---especially for the long-term increase in site quality, may fully justify the no-cut recommendation.) This is not negative economics; it is a promotion of rational financial strategies to maximize specific, decided benefits from which profits and other benefits in the long list above can be gained from the working land platform over a very long time. We may call it a program for "sustained benefits" if we must (wading into the "sustained yield" and "sustained development" morass Chapter 8)). While supportive of "biodiversity" enthusiasm, we take that phrase to mean and include more than endangered species preservation. We believe that a variety of animals are needed for a variety of plants and that plants, including trees, need animals for rooting-body development, fertilization, and many other parts of their complex set of life requirements and stand-support functions. We work to maintain and enhance particular aspects of forest stands, pasture units, waters, and crop fields -- hundreds of such parts, and are reluctant to generalize and to amalgamate them unnecessarily with the quick excuses of "natural variance."
Rural System needs (1) a few people who see the needs, (2) to gain capital for the investment, (3) to enlist the dedicated leaders and employees of the groups, (4) to encourage non-resident landowners and local to enter their lands into corporate management for profit …and thereby create a new home for humans.
I taught with the university architectural faculty for a few years and some of them held the premise that a design was never any good unless the structure was actually built. That idea was debated, but the kernel of the debate was one about total systems practicality. The ideas of Rural System? …Just Dreaming, a design, can only be judged to be good (or not) after they have been implemented. I can write, think, discuss, even develop computer simulations of these ideas, but they need to be tested in the fires of building, maintenance, performance, and critique. I'm working on finding a way or ways to implement the ever-improving ideas. Perhaps the readers can help find a way.
There are some consulting foresters, very few wildlife management consultants. One of the reasons for the difference is that individuals cannot stabilize a cash flow. An expert may get a contract for work, but before the job is completed, he or she must spend much time and effort to try to obtain another contract. Projects are unique and expertise is limited. Costs to produce single-person expert documents are high. The average wildlife resource consultant cannot link with others to develop a business large enough to achieve economies of scale, to achieve stability that comes with diversification. Holdover funds for contingencies can rarely be gained while all efforts are spent on securing the next job or improving a response to the present one. There are numerous parallels within this brief analysis of the consultant and with the farms, counties, and enterprises within the counties of the region. The difficulties do not have to be belabored. The design here addresses these conditions of the past. It includes gaining sufficient size, diversifying, reaching reasonable limits (but beyond the boundaries), developing adequate contingency resources, doing effective marketing, adding value, using knowledge, generating profitable ideas, and unifying human health with improved and sustained environmental quality. The tasks are many and enormous and no one should ask spiteful questions about why hasn't someone done something? There are major barriers now and they have been greater in the past.
The needs, as for any other idea, are for someone to try it …or shoot it down …or revise it. The prospects seem worth an investment, whether done by a singular corporation operating off of or out of its own lands or by a group of stockholders who really want an answer to "What will we do with some steep, brushy, mountain land that we can't give to Uncle Sam and that no one wants to buy ..… after the recognized resources are gone?" The answer is that with Rural System we develop such an area or farm into a productive land and water base for action within a diverse profitable corporation. The mere presence of the corporation and its opportunities adds value to the land. The concept is difficult to put simply, even more difficult to implement.
Readers have to be skeptical of anyone who claims to have ideas or suggestions for solving massive problems. Being skeptical has repetitious musical refrains such as "are you sure this is 'the thing' to do?," along with "if it was any good, it would have been done before," "who does he think he is?," and "it probably wont work." Besides having a little nerve, being willing to risk a little embarrassment, I have arrived on Earth after a series of big changes. I live when we have a convergence of new techniques and pressures with which we can go to work. We have new ideas, but even old ideas may work now, for there are so many changes that a new environment has been created. Positive people can be blinded by the brightness of possible successes. Utopians might discount the hard work needed, the power of nay-sayers, the plight of stockholders, and the ease with which well-meaning people can misdirect an effort. Utopians cannot believe how hurricanes, tornadoes, stock market crashes, invasive insects, new technology, greedy ignorant people, or caring competitors can destroy their scenarios.
No one of the following parts of Rural System is worth highlighting alone, but several make a brand new day, a new opportunity to "fix things" within the newly emerging, rapidly changing rural environment. The following characteristics and their effects will show up in the following chapters:
Rural System fights to get around contradictory people who celebrate free market economics and the independent entrepreneurial spirit but who are also the champions of tax breaks and financial giveaways by local governments for big corporations. The costs and constraints of taking such gifts skew the computations of profits. The competitive advantages of those who take them are great, but we shall have to see whether they are excessive and death-dealing. Some say that taking these public offerings is "the only way" and essential to modern business. We shall see.
In-sourcing
Off-shore "outsourcing," the practice of using foreign workers to handle many administrative and technological tasks, from answering phones to programming computers, is now well known. In India and China especially, an increasingly well-educated workforce can offer high-end services for a fraction of the cost of employing Americans. We believe that we have significant powerful human resources in rural areas, Americans interested in and willing to work, and we have a condition of old tasks no longer available. Land, equipment, and markets have changed. Even though agriculture remains important in some rural communities, only 6.5 percent of the rural labor force is engaged in farming and the proportion of the rural labor force engaged in manufacturing is the same as that in urban America. There are loyal and talented people in rural areas. These capable workers, if willing to see the personal financial advantages of living in rural areas and working with Rural System, can provide a special type of out-sourcing…national and regional in-sourcing, performing high quality services and other benefits and bringing new tasks into the rural employment base.
Part of the in-sourcing strategy is to develop with local colleges, universities, and others study and training programs for specific tasks. These educational centers can provide strong computer science and information systems programs for employees and prospective employees (often enrolled students). Centers, some requiring physical presence of students, but many needing only distance-learning support functions, may operate for other industries. The centers and diverse work allow people who are under-employed and those with secondary responsibilities of care of the elderly, children, or home-making to move upward along economic and other scales of importance. Some will find that they can retain family land and also utilize their considerable skills and local knowledge in systems building and management.
We need not bring enterprises to an office or work site. Our energies in 20th-century work are within a transforming economy based primarily on information and technology. A rural economic development strategy centered on best crops or best tractors is as forward-thinking as was an effort to build a horse-drawn buggy plant in 1904.
Wages for the work for Rural System in-sourcing will not be as low as those in China and India, but they will be lower than in the rest of the country. There are no cultural or language barriers, and no foreign legal minefields. Leadership will be close-by if corporate management staff needs to visit, and some work just fits better with a domestic workforce.
The Rural System concept and organization won't be for everyone. There will be many participants, buyers of goods and services, and people affected. It must be voluntary for participants with land. It is founded on the basis of moral pragmatism, that is, if it is good and works, then people will be attracted and will participate. Participants are rewarded. Rural System needs a demonstration like a hybrid-corn demonstration field. Staff of the Extension service planted hybrid corn along the roadside on a few farms of the so-called "early adopters," When the corn growth was seen, other people began using the superior grains. The system is bigger than a corn field. The initial cost and risk are very high and conspicuous production delayed. Start small has been commonplace advice.
Creation of one enterprise or "group," or only a few new enterprises will not work. The evidence is in: small businesses fail; small farms fail; small towns fail. Small enterprises in declining areas are poor investments. An adequate-sized total system is needed. The economies of scale, of shared resources, of shifting employees, of planned multiple use of resources and equipment, of adding value to products in the region (not shipping them out), of personal incentives, of rewards, of loyalty to the region and its people and to the corporation, of assistance in planning and economic analyses - all of these can make the difference between success and the spurt of a government program. They make the difference in the enthusiasm for Rural System and that which is created by a new factory that hires 300 people (but is viewed as temporary) and adds untold new demands and costs to the rural county celebrating its arrival.
Rural System will be evident and eventually adopted. I do not believe we have the same time for casual adoption of policies and programs and working units for the future. I do believe we must get started soon and show profits. That's the modern meaning of "it works." Participants do not yet know the other gains, values added to society, or how they may benefit from them. They are assumed to work from the grounds of opportunity-cost theory … they make "at least this much." The alternative views are to risk not doing anything differently, ignoring the warnings and discounting the risks, or getting started with confidence in ingenuity, continual improvement, and improvisation.
Rural System is not a socialist's plot and, at least as I understand Adam Smith, it is not a free-market pricing strategy. It is not a planned economy but planning is encouraged for the individual landowner. It seems well known that unplanned farming under capitalism can lead to resource exploitation. Rural System concepts are definitely not exploitative and are limited by ways that will change in yet-unknowable ways for each Rural System Tract (the private lands under contract). These are uncertain ways, usually unique for each tract, each year, because each computer analysis uses non-linear relations and constraints.
Hawken (1993:34) observed that
"setting out to redesign or startup a business so that it does maintain a holistic relationship between economy and ecology, the ethical entrepreneur is handicapped financially since he bears the costs of additional responsibilities he's assumed and which his competitors have shunned. Thus the commercial acts that would lead us away from runaway economic devastation, although sound in the principles of nature, are unsound by the standards of the economy."There will be observers and those who hang-on and gain from the secondary effects of the Rural System. These gains will be tallied as a good result; we are all connected. At least we can add to a supportive surrounding of people who resist paying for pollution- and waste-cleanup for which they get nothing in return.
We propose to make slight claims on the land of each owner as we invest in his or her land for increasing the joint benefits likely to be received over many years. Should an owner decide to sell land soon after such investment, Rural System's investment in that person's land might be viewed as a loss. We tally the gains, however small, count the losses, remove and replant productive plants and recent developments if possible, achieve a small delay in the final sale, and seek to work with the subsequent owner.
Hawken (1993:103), deriding big corporations, commented on "the enormity of their shadow, the rigidity of their thinking, their unbridled hidden power," and said that they "…take care of what they know how to take care of, and that is other big things: factories, mass markets, mass production … the opposite of nature." Perhaps, but that is the current situation. It is the environment within which a solution must be crafted. It is a changing, increasingly corporate world and if desired change is to come, then a competitive alternative must be created. Denying it or its influence won't help. A strong alternative is needed to the social costs imposed by poorly regulated big corporations. Perhaps learning from and joining in its demonstrated positive principles and techniques (surely none of the bad effects were intended) may be beneficial to the rural resources and to the people dependent upon them. Of course we are interested in the environment, nature, and natural resources … but we assert that …in the same breath… we are at least as interested in the welfare and health of people, all of them, with only one exception. We have difficulty helping the self-consciously socially-separate, the criminal and the solitary person using or addicted to thought-altering drugs. We plan protection, and we are open to discussions with those interested in personal change.
I recall reading of the origin of the cooperative wildlife research units. A small group of such units was created cooperatively among state and federal agencies, the Wildlife Management Institute, and universities to educate professional wildlife biologists. I personally benefited. At the time (early 1930s) there were few such "biologists." Now there are many. Many states have such units, and there are many more graduates from them than there are jobs available. There was no "stop button" for either Units or their graduates. Politicians wanted one Unit for each state. Government agency job openings and pay scales restricted competition. Demand for services (what's a wildlife biologist?) was low. Many dimensions of this situation have changed including Earth-day interests, biodiversity laws, urbanization, decreases in hunting interest, international interest in wildlife protection, and the financial resources of the graduates themselves. The demand for wildlife services, unknown 50 years ago, is now great and growing and the state "game-oriented" agencies are shrinking and cannot properly respond to the changing demands of hunters (declining), and land owners beset by vertebrate animal damage (increasing). The collective changes in this small topic alone (and there are many other such changes) suggest a very new fertile environment for Rural System.
There is no need for a new religious reformation, or new environmentalism, or new educational programs, or government subsidy, or a new political party, or corporate denial of their mode of operation, or an industrial takeover, or leaving the region (before it sinks), or denial of the bill of rights. I recommend legal, self-interest, profit-motivated capitalism of a new kind, the described distributed system of enterprises called Rural System.
I said we are not waiting for a breakthrough (implying discovery or technological) for this Rural System concept to work. We are waiting for a dawning that the coal region (and others rural regions with special problems to which I relate similarly) is going to be a very poor place for people if something is not done soon. Some say that the awareness of the problems gives the fathers and mothers of these difficult region's children new responsibilities. Without action, that awareness will only leave a layer of guilt over the region, a burden on taxpayers, and a region full of disgusting fearsome socio-economic problems. A viable region cannot be sustained for the next 50 years by deep coal, shifting factories, a urban work ethic, or ponderous unpredictable political processes. Regions in an oil-short nation will test knowledge of history, technology, and will … and the power of Rural System.
I planned the Rural System in the early '80s and thought I might get to work toward its accomplishments. No one reads big books of recommendations and big ideas cannot be written in little books. Journals publish research; professors review; new collections of old ideas do not fare well when reviewed. "Wholes" can never precisely satisfy the critique of a single-topic expert. For some university administrators Rural System "things" did not sound like what I, then a forestry, zoology, or wildlife professor should be doing. They withdrew support and early drafts of the Rural System concept was put on the shelf for ten more years. Just as "the farm" was not the solution, it is now evident that only complex, well-designed, computer-augmented decision making can take land use into the future so that it provides a quality place for humans. The last of the coal is now being mined. People are now leaving for the cities. Yet people still do studies on growing turf grass, small herds of cows, and planted trees on mined-land benches. "The small" will not solve "the big." I continue to design, describe, and suggest Rural System. Some day it will be created.
The Rest of the Book
I've struggled to decide on the best pattern for my remaining chapters. The best sequence is not evident; many solutions exist only when they are seen as parallel, not sequential. I have separated the book into two parts, the first giving the principles and policies or what is behind the system and its pieces and functions. The second part gives examples, and in one chapter the perceived reasons for resistance to Rural System.
Chapter 2 is a response to several grievously perplexed people who have said, "Just tell me a story," because it seems very complicated. So I tell 21 stories, most very brief. Some readers may grow impatient and will use the table of contents to find a chapter about their particular interest or area of current work.
Chapter 3 is about system design, both its special meaning, and the way that something as large and complex as Rural System needs to be limited and its functions modeled, not summarized … for that assures incorrectness.
Chapter 4 speaks to other aspects of design, particularly a rationally robust policy.
Chapter 5 is the most general but most important chapter in the book. I've shared the concepts there with students for years because of their importance. It is about how we know anything, especially about how we know whether Rural System is "right" for the challenges ahead. It deals with folk knowledge and all of the knowledge upon which Rural System is proposed to rest. It delves into a much-needed alternative to science. Skip it if you will, but you will see references to it in other chapters.
Chapter 6 reviews general system theory and my interpretations of it and presents the systems approach used throughout.
Chapter 7, badly needed before this position within the book, is about objectives or goals.
Chapter 8 attacks one of the major objectives held for things environmental, i.e., sustainability.
Chapter 9 describes quality of life as an objective and a means to develop a score useful in describing it and its change. A system is described for communities as well as land owners … eventually to become a product and service.
Chapter 10 lists the sectors of Rural System and lists all of the Groups that have been proposed and sketched, the enterprises working together within the conglomerate.
Chapter 11 describes "centering,"the name for the combined administrative, leadership, and support services that create collective efficiencies for all of the groups or enterprises.
Chapter 12 addresses the working platform, dealing with meanings of land and relevant units needed for future analyses and specific management. Not just "food and fiber" is proposed as being the services and products of the enterprises of the greater system.
Chapter 13 addresses soils, a major dimension of the working platform.
Chapter 14 presents the Land Force, the diverse, well-equipped, multi-talented field crew serving the needs of many enterprises, especially as they work on Rural System Tracts and land of absentee owners and others.
Chapter 15 addresses system processes.
Chapter 16 presents the reasons why ecosystem management is not the process or policy being used.
Chapter 17address an important proces, marketing.
Later chapters (14 of them) tackle the other major part of a systems approach and treat special ones that emerge from ecological and energetic systems and that relate directly to entrepreneurial systems. I attempt to describe the subsystems, the performance of groups as they might have existed, flourished, and achieved the objectives. Chapters, like described pieces of a quilt, can provide no understanding of the quilt's beauty, scale, or heavy winter warmth.
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