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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
October, 2007
Chapter 12. The Working Platform
Dreaming: So tired … mixing, stirring … so tired. The brushes are ready. I must paint, and paint … and paint. Things rust, are scarred, weakened … I must paint, and paint … for everything is old, declining, depreciating and they need replenishment, and repair, and maintenance. Every new act requires adding the maintenance act. That's an ugly word … maintenance … not like lavender, or soft, or brush … I must paint, and paint … Just dreaming …
| Definitions, the alpha unit, the working platform concept, land owners, capital, private land under contract, and Rural System Tracts |
Places and Sites
Global financial integration, air travel, the Internet, and advanced communications may have rendered the concept of place irrelevant for corporations such as the proposed Rural System. E-commerce, not a bulldozer, may still be the primary flattener of Earth (Friedman 2005). We shall have to wait and see. It may be that place is fundamentally important and has such a strong command of our thought, ideas, sequences, efficiencies, and loyalties that it must be accorded great attention. In Chapter 5, along with ten other ways that philosophers have described " how we know what we know," is a base of knowledge called " place." In the Internet world and those parts of wireless communications and efficient delivery systems, where a crop is grown makes little difference as long as it is delivered to the wholesaler or to the customer. The " middleman" (now a sexist term) needs only buy and coordinate delivery from the proper number of respected growers. Assembly for resale is a step that can be omitted. The programmer need not go to an office to work. The same or better work can be done from the home office and exchanges and queries made, not over the partition separating colleagues but over the phone lines or air waves. " Going to work" was a physical act. Now it can mean starting … anywhere and doing it well, achieving objectives with colleagues of the enterprise, wherever they are. Gaining from them knowledge and ideas does not require a meeting, a conference, a visit. Where are the rural opportunities? " Where?" is a common and appropriate question for the past, for it had great importance then. Now it seems less important since ideas are exchanged, committees meet by phone and Internet, products are as likely to be from South America as California. The service worker is more likely to be handling orders and transactions from India than the state capitol. Trucks roll into assembly plants from manufacturing plants around the world and trucks roll out with assembled products leaving no meaning to " made in the USA" or any other place.
I think " place" or " place-based" is a word being more badly used but only slightly less frequently, than " focus." The focal point is the location of that to which you are pointing and talking about, the topic of interest and discussion. Most things have a location. Telling me I need to focus on something suggests that I need to take a closer look, avoid the distractions at the edges, a need to clarify and be more precise about a location or the limits of a topic. In Rural System I seem to contradict myself, seeking to be broad on some topics, yet suggesting a system becoming precise. The difference is that of time and giving dynamic, always-shifting attention to the context of the system on which work progresses, shifting continually in scale.
Rural
For years I struggled with the spatial categories used within wildlife management. It seemed to me that they did not properly call bobwhite quail "farm game" for these birds are found on abandoned farm. Similarly, deer that were of the forest but more-so the field and they were called forest game. The muskrats that were of wetlands as well as farm ponds and river banks were everywhere. The categories were general, more for the ease of teachers and editors than students or people who worked in the field. Similarly "wildland" seemed to serve well, but the intensively managed forest was not "wild" and it was surely not wilderness. Managed marshlands (using dams and dykes, fire, fertilizers, etc.) were not wild. Neither is the quail's fencerow or the deer's pasture wild. The birds of the pine plantation were no different than the birds of the common coastal pine forest. Urban wildlife was not wild and author after author added evidence that people have been influencing the space of animals and their foods since the glaciers receded. "Wild" was always conditional; it always needed a modifier. When "land" was added, it de-emphasized the aquatic systems of rural places and that was unacceptable. "Uplanders" have too easily excluded study of and integrating knowledge of the water cycle and all of the creatures. They are inseparable, except in the "uni-versity" and government agencies. There is need for a simple, general concept, very fuzzy at the edges, with a meaning not worth discussing because that will waste time in implementing projects for people and their environment. The word needed is "rural," and it means no more than "not urban" which is the general space where general human problems are generally the same. Rural connotes little more that where population and structural densities, human interactions, value per unit of land, contagious disease risks, consumption of energy, and diversity of interests and abilities of people are all significantly greater than on areas that we can label "urban." The definition of rural remains a problem for census analysts and it usually is an adjective for populations in counties in which there is no city or town.
Late (2007) in developing Rural System we added Border, a group addressing the many special problems and opportunities at the border of urban areas such as wild faunal conflicts (Adams et al. 2006), allergens, and controversies over noise and unpleasant rural odors. It concentrated on the users of rural areas where as an emphasis throughtout had been on the people living within or owning such areas.
Whether land is " wild" or not may be only a temporary designation and that is often a personal perception. Land units may be covered with roads and pastures but, at a cost (or over time) these are likely to change. Units of ownership have a currently designated use. It is specified: That field is in corn; that area is a white oak stand. Each evident mapable area may be in transition, each has a temporary designation. They may be changed for many reasons. Economists tend to note that land has the special characteristic that its use for a purpose precludes use for another. This is clearly different that the premises of Rural System because each land unit may have many uses, certainly seasonally, but with care, at the same time (e.g., growing wood, providing recreational income, and reducing costs of water loss). Also, the price paid for land (as generally for other commodities) does not finance the creation of new land (Harriss 1980:128). Work within Rural System tends to be novel, for, as described, it expands the uses and purposes of land in forests, pastures, and waters and when it is working as planned, it invests in owned land to restore it and thereby increase its profitability over time.
" Rural has no specific meaning of place, for it may be an uninhabited coastal wild wetland or a mountain top trail. It may also be more agricultural, less populated, and less built-up and have more diverse birdlife than a farm when it is an intercity park or a residential peninsula into the urban core.
I'm no longer sure what any words mean. I must proceed like some Alice-figure and say they mean what I want them to mean. The dictionary hints that " rural" means " of or relating to the country, country people, or agriculture," and maybe it is just everything that is not urban. Maybe it is where some people do specialized work but that involves people doing irrigation, beef and crop raising, logging, rural development, machine sales, food processing, housing and real estate, international trade, research and development, education and extension… without end. Things have really changed from the days when we " visited a farm."
Words and the things they symbolized are now much mixed and that is part of the problem. Sadly " rural" now means speculation land. Rural is the blood of a drunk selling himself at a city blood bank. " Agricultural" or rural is a zoning category used by some planners as a holding action until something, anything that someone wants to put on the land, comes along as a proposal for changing zoning and gaining an exception to code. Rural means bedroom community. It is the industrial farm, the industrial forest, and the place where a lot of very poor people slightly displaced still live…next to elaborate starter castles on hill tops and beside lakes and rivers. It is both industrial brownfield and pasture, lake and highway right of way, abandoned strip mine and solid waste disposal site. It is the dispersed community if seasonal workers, the residual company town in the coalfield. In some areas it includes vast military areas with unexploded weaponry …the last places where a few endangered plant and animal species exist. It is pasture and feedlot; watering area and silo; fallow brushfield after a fire and fresh green wetland after a warm spring shower. It is federal and state land, those parks, forests, and areas with fancy names like conservation areas, management zones, and historic sites. It is where local politicians beg for an industrial replacement while they are publishing expensive slick brochures about local natural landscape beauty, recreational potentials, and ecotourism. It is where whole mountains have lost their tops for a seam of coal; whole rivers have been piped into thirsty city service. It is great lakes and small ponds; sluggish polluted streams and sparkling, bubbling trout waters. If anyone notices, it is groundwater and fresh air. Where it stops at the salty ocean edge, no one knows. It is inherited land.
Calvin beal in The Characterization of Types of Non-Metropolitan Areas, 1981)said, "In one sense, the changes taking place in rural and small-town areas today represent an urbanization of countryside and village life. ...This is not to imply that most rural towns have grown to urban size. Rather, there is a more thorough penetration of rural life by amenities, industries, businesses, institutions, communications, programs, laws, styles, family structure, social ills, and stresses and strains that were once regarded as basically urban in nature. It has not been entirely a one-way street. The rise of country music, charismatic religion, and rural based forms of outdoor recreation represents a penetration of urban life by essentially rural values."
Much that is rural is owned by people who do not live on the land, some never having seen it. New groups form " timos" (timber management organizations) to buy and hold land for speculation, timber production, and certain tax and investment advantages. Legislative changes (or unsettling uncertainties) are enough to suggest everyone walk away from crop or livestock production (tobacco land changes, sugar and peanut supports, and shifts of land into and out of production.) Pests and invasive species are minor threats within this hazard soup. Legislative rules for increasing " clean crops" do not match well with legislative drops in air pollution controls. Stressed " rural land" seems like the phrase for farms and forests, but it is the interspersed small towns people (the little stores, mechanics, insurance, etc.) and especially the school children that sit on busses for more than 2 hours a day that are my concerns. Rural? " A place of entropy" may be correct; chaos may suffice.
To understand Rural System, people have to shift their thoughts rapidly among different scales and times and also among different places, those which are both regional and very site specific. This is a chapter about such places, ranging from general concepts of " rural" and land and its uses, to specific analyses as the alpha-unit scale, then about the challenges of the " working unit" concept. Getting past the assumptions of this Chapter 12 is difficult because not only these must be known but also the present system known well to imagine what the proposed changes that will be brought by Rural System might mean.
The reader needs to recall that there are great differences between private and public land owners and decision makers. The individual decision makers also differ in relation to the scale of operation or economic size of their ownership and there they live. People's familiarity with land, even their feeling of ownership or responsibility, vary with age and past visitations and work experiences in rural areas. Now most Americans have grown up without any farm experiences. This chapter is a long but important trip that attempts to explain a special concept of rural space and thus more of what Rural System really is, its scope, and why it will work when past efforts have failed.
Land
This chapter is about " land," a code word use throughout Rural System intended to be inclusive of lakes, ponds, streams, soil, crop fields, gardens, mined areas, pastures, rangelands, brushy areas, fencerows, and forested areas. It includes the roads, houses, barns, cabins, and related buildings of such areas. It is all of the non-marine attributes of Earth and connotes area and soil and rock, but it is mainly things seen such as water, animals, plants, and minerals but also the dry (or moist) dirty (or clean) air around leaves and animals. It is sunshine and wind. It, like unseen wind, is the title, adjacency, laws, policies, and " pressures" that exist for a mapped space (Harvey 1979). It is " land" as in " landscape," more than a place.
" Land" to the people of Rural System means all things terrestrial and aquatic within an ownership. It is a volume - latitude, longitude, and elevation, everything above and below the mapped surface of an ownership. Land has connotations of terrestrial things, but I include air above as well as water and the minerals under the surface. After analyses, decisions about it may begin. Land may be covered with roads, ponds, trees, or buildings. Land can be covered by a camp site, a corn crop, or a shopping center. While certain other things may not be suitable for a tract of land, trees or pastures or crop production are rarely the only things for which any tract in uniquely suitable. Presence of trees is thus a decision, one by a person who has either left them alone after some historical events or who has planted and encouraged them. Trees have no intrinsic " right" to an acre. Trees are thus a decision. Collectively as forests, they may provide benefits or incur high costs. Trees or pastures, for example, are said to be a designated use. That field is in corn; that is a white oak stand; that is a cattle feedlot. Each evident mapable area may be in transition. Such areas have a temporary designation. They may be changed for many reasons.
Lands need not and should not be managed as forests, or fields, but as total farms or elements of total Rural Systems. A " summer-place" may be a cabin, yard, field, stream, and wooded area. It is bought, sold, taxed, and thought about as " the place" or " the cabin." Decisions are made by individuals, not about forests or crop fields, but about their total holdings. To sell or buy, to fertilize, to delay harvests -- all are decisions made in the context of annual income, investments, taxes, family health, and the owner's age and that of his or her children.
A forest, as important as it may be to a forester or recreationist, is only a part of an estate. If the owner is " bankrupt," no optimum management strategy can be devised (unless " clearcut and sell" is the strategy. Each forest or pasture needs to be seen as one " stock" in a stock-and-bond investment portfolio. It may be " up" or " down" or " holding its own." A portfolio manager will rarely make decisions about the fate of any held stock or bond without thinking about the total holdings, long-term objectives, estimates of total holdings financial performance, and naturally, estimates of future interest rates, the nature of the economy, and how likely political change may influence it. Its net returns may influence capital-gains taxes and even the tax bracket of the owner. To cut or not cut timber may be a tax-based decision, not acceptance or rejection of a forester's recommendation based on superior tree growth models and financial models of the forest itself. Most landowners now know more about stock value growth than tree growth.
I realized early in seeking solutions for Virginia strip-mined area re-development that such areas can be used for anything. I could grow bananas on them! It seemed a silly observation because there is hidden in such discussions of reclamation sourceless ideas that there should be very low costs and that things should be as natural as possible. Bananas grown in hot houses satisfy neither assumption. The " banana challenge" suggests the unlimited possibilities of land uses, from deep wine storage vaults, to waste dumps, to high-rise buildings or whole villages. I had been trapped by an unspoken wildlife manager's premise that only providing fairly natural food and cover for game animals was proper (not facing that more grain or forage per dollar would enter and benefit the animals if purchased and fed than attempted by volunteers planting seeds on marginal land.)
The Working Platform
Not very satisfying or very " warm," I think it is useful to step away, just temporarily, from the historical, esthetic, and metaphysical connotations of rural land and try to build a concept of it… then to return and repair that concept so it can be useful. The need became apparent when it dawned on me that superior forest management returns were integrated into the annual state and federal tax reports made by landowners. No surprise to most framers! The total land unit, the total ownership, inheritance, and investments are collectively the productive unit for the private farm land owner, not just forests.
Rural land has classically been viewed as soil and water, as the " farm place." It is now best conceived as a working platform. It is a place for timely decisions. It may produce profits from trees over time, or profitable angler recreation hours from ponds, or flowers for sale. It may also be an area for parking cars, housing a product warehouse or a gas well, or housing a writer, software-developer, or poet. It is a place where people live and ideas and art objects and functions are produced. It is more than the area holding together two places on a map.
That platform is one of ecological limits, local preferences and values, and costs. It can be heartlessly viewed as a shell building, an empty factory. To achieve a functional factory with profits, the factory must be maintained. The concept of land as a working platform clears the way for considering all possible alternatives and their risks and costs. It removes temporarily the soul of land that is sensed by individuals and demands full-scale accountability for what exists, what is likely, so that the objectives of long-term bounded profits can be achieved. That accountability includes repair and continued management. It may require renewal, but that assumes the past practices and conditions remain within the cost-effective solution. Crisp new dollars or dull ones - they go into the same bag. They are made with the assistance of and because of the existence of neighbors, roads, structures, proximities, local security, and even the perilousness of the finances of the owner due to college demands, family sickness, stock market fluctuations, … gambling debts… or other factors. A forest, for example, is large and conspicuous. Trees can be cut and dollars received, but the total land ownership (or lack of land acres) produces the commodity - sufficient amounts of wood for sale at a specific price. Of course forest economics is important and forests need to be analyzed separately, but only within the reasonable context of the total ownership.
The rural " area" is a volume with profit potential. By limiting use of " land" and using " the working platform," the people of Rural System can begin to loosen the suffocating hold of past language on seeing the potentials of rural space and volume. We can start considering the land ownership as a working platform, a wealth platform, perhaps akin to some space-age, science-fiction behemoth. The working platform becomes a space for difficult decisions, an ecological space but also an esthetic, economic, and energetic space with a very long time dimension. Perhaps now in trees (or any other current use, a result of past decisions and indecisions), an ownership is viewed as broadly and openly as possible with potentials unexamined or unimagined. To leave it in trees or cropland is a decision yet to be made. To explore with computer assistance all of the possibilities and potentials … and the next idea … within an array of natural and other limits over time may be the fate of the platform. Then will come the decision and its implementation.
Perhaps land now becomes the giant pallet used in the giant warehouse. It must be defined in new ways so that it can become the form for creative work with few influences and constraints of the current conditions (usually assumed to be pretty good). The platform is the size of the ownership and its potential viewscape, about 3 miles in all directions from the boundary. Specifically, it is a map window of the ownership boundary plus 100 meters on all sides. (The large and intermediate zones around the ownership are established for data collecting and knowledge-base building as we prepare for the possibilities of scenic views to and from the area, air pollution, and proximity problems and risks - noise, pollution, protection, access, fire danger, trespass, and runoff. For example for local wildlife, the knowledge base must include their food, water, and nesting sites on neighboring lands and waters.)The working platform is a volume from which goods and services and other benefits may arise. It is the area that we may be able to influence (and should consider trying when needed). Of course crops and timber are products, but other things can and need to be produced and can be active there. It is the place from which profits may be produced … unlimited. It may be a place rejected for an alternative function. The working platform is the single land ownership and its borders but it is more like the area of a factory with parking lot, roads, and many buildings of different sizes and functions. There may be a pasture and a forest but throughout these and other components used directly for those classical purposes, there may be activities throughout the year by staff and members of other groups within Rural System.
These platforms (or columnar volumes) are where ideas are generated, wood is dried, crafts are made, unusual products are picked, and value is added to products. They are places where reports are produced and where computers run. They are where benefits are produced… all of those derived from well known products, not-so-well-known services, opportunities of yet-unimagined types, views in many directions, information (stored), ideas, inspiration, memberships (administration, data, leadership, meetings, activities, communications, linkages), and memories.
For example, we can decide to put the right species of trees on the proper site to insure maximum growth, minimum stresses, minimum insect and disease and thus minimum needs for pesticides and fungicides, and reasonable costs later for thinnings, fertilizers, and harvests. Such a decision is now possible because we know the likely location of planned roads and other factors. They are mapped within alpha units (10 meter by 10 meter map squares described later). The working platform and the surrounding land ownership is composed of such alpha units. It is presumed to exist for conventional production of conventional products but it is also for any legal action or other products that advances the system to its objectives of sustained profits. Thus, the platform is for sitting and dreaming, for inventing, for writing and selling poetry, for storing products, or for creating software. It is for natural resource-related activities directed at the long-term objective of achieving reasonable profits from the platform within limits. The work can reduce risks, reduce peaks or troughs in performance indices, increase diversity, provide substitutions, change behaviors to achieve any and all of these … anything, legal work toward the small but overpowering objectives.
Analytical and Prescriptive Work on the Platform
The platform must include the actual dimensions above the surface - viewscapes, odorscapes, and soundscapes, climate and air pollution above ground (The legal dimension of this is recognized, i.e., Justice Douglas in the Causby opinion, 1946, that the landowner has control upward only as far as is necessary for reasonable use and enjoyment of the surface as adjudged on a case-by-case basis.) and below the ground - mining, geology, karst solution channels (in limestone) forming ground water aquifers. Below ground can be mapped the dynamics of pollution and especially saltwater intrusion into coastal aquifers such as is occurring due to excessive freshwater withdrawal. We can map the likely new wetlands resulting from continental ice melt following climatic warming.
The working platform is for producing conventional products but it is also for any legal action or other products that advances the system to its objectives of sustained profits. Thus, the platform is for sitting and dreaming, for inventing, for writing and selling poetry, for storing products, for creating software. It is for natural resource-related activities directed at the long-term objective of achieving reasonable profits within limits. The work can reduce risks, reduce peaks or troughs in performance indices, increase diversity, provide substitutions, change behaviors to achieve any and all of these … anything, legal work toward the small but overpowering objectives.
First must be answered whether we need the specific development and it will be done! (A court or regulatory agency authority usually makes that decision.) If and only if the answer is " yes," then we can find such a least-bad place. (How can we know? See Chapter 5.) There are no good places, for all places have costs, impacts, and risks. We may seek only the least bad. With current computer power existing within systems called Geographic Information Systems (GIS) we can now, for example, locate superior foot trails to link great viewing spots. We can hide powerlines (reduce the probable sighting of such lines) and reduce pipeline impacts to important scenes. We have been adventurous in considering " painting" a landscape with managed forests to achieve desired autumn leaf colors in a scene. It is unlikely that we shall ever try, but we believe it can be done.
We have the GIS and now find the best places for white pines, the worst places for beets, the best areas for certain types of forage grasses, the best places where goatherds can achieve greatest efficiency in milk production, where grape varieties produce abundant flavorful juices. The working platform is now well known, but we must retrieve the knowledge, put it into working models, produce the reports, and show that precision land management is possible, and needs to be done for the good of the land and for the pocket books of landowners and their communities. (Sadly, we have had the capabilities and advocated their uses for the above for over 30 years. Time's up.)
What goes-on on the Tract is to be decided. Decisions are aided by Q Works, the central system of Rural System described in Chapter 5. We know many things about each alpha unit of the working platform, typically the values for more than 100 factors. For example, we can put (or encourage the ones already present) the right trees on the proper site to insure maximum growth, minimum stresses, minimum insect and disease and thus minimum needs for pesticides and fungicides, and reasonable costs later for thinnings, fertilizers, and harvests because we know the likely location of planned roads and other factors. The Tract, seen as the platform, is for conventional production of conventional products but it is also for any legal action or other products that advances the system to its objectives of sustained profits.
We have had experience in visual analyses of land that may be affected by powerlines and general aviation airports. The platform may be considered the volume to be protected or volumes where the risk of intrusion and financial loss to planned activities and profit seeking is to be reduced. Similarly, when analyzed and decided, it can be the selected platform (or part of it) where the long-term costs and disproducts to people and " the environment" will be the least.
Often there is no best place to put a development (especially since few agencies or utility companies have decided and quantified objectives (for only then can " best" be decided). The decision alternative for large developments such as powerlines, dams, and highways has two essential parts in sequence:
While very much involved with and personally concerned about plants, animals, lands and waters, and being a long-term student of " ecology," I only tend to be in favor of " conservation" and " biodiversity." I know that these words are too soft, almost meaningless and mere grounds for pleasant, long conversations or television clips. It seems essential to me and for all of us to be reasonably precise, don the hairshirt of accountability, and begin some difficult, very human systems work with its kindly feedback. We have to begin to use results of past studies and current best knowledge of how natural and managed so-called " natural systems" work. While typically we may say, " first, we must… " (e.g., describe the ecological system), there can be no clear sequence when dealing with such a large and complex entity and its changes as the farm, forest, or surface-mining operation. We must move simultaneously, however inefficiently, toward the useful end … the operating Rural System.
The Rural Land Owner or Decision Maker
The private landowners with whom I imagine the staff of Rural System interacting are often new land owners, those seeking improved returns from their land, or those seeking generally improved satisfaction and quality of life for them or their families resulting from land ownership. The likely others are the absentee landowners, inheritors, vacation-land owners, or those who have given up and gone to the cities. They are " marginal" living on the edge of the financial fence or at the edge of exasperation (or are about to become so), and need help to avoid that discomfort. Others are elderly and are in emotional pain, accompanying that of arthritis, for they are contemplating moving off of the farm they love and there are few guides for doing so … and great uncertainty. They may have no children or children who favor city conveniences over love of land and do not yet see its potentials (as described herein). The others, a grand mix, work off of the land in cities, drive long distances and only enjoy their ownership a little on the weekends amid hundreds of maintenance chores, inefficiencies, and insecurities. There is ample testimony to the emotional nature of land, to the deep personal, family, and community-wide sorrow caused by the loss of land to government projects, industrial mountain-top removals for coal, to wars, and to bankruptcy.
Individuals considering adding their lands to the Rural System Tracts may see Rural System as requiring too much loss of control or ownership. Major private assurances are guaranteed but nevertheless, the loss may seem to be too great. The basic premises are operative: " money talks," and " seeing is believing." Some owners will not want to participate. This is expected and accepted. The activity must be free and voluntary. There is more work that can easily be done on lands of those that will care to participate. An early estimate is that within 5 years, over 100,000 acres in the region will be under contract. Undue emphasis should not be given to land area but to the many units of the conglomerate, only half of which are outdoors-dependent.
Tracts may be seen as if they were small state forests or parks (with which many people are familiar) and each has a distinctive sign. They are private however, and open only to owners and members in good standing of specific groups of Rural System. The Tracts are typically over 50-acres in size. Individuals considering adding their lands to the system of Tracts may see Rural System as requiring too much loss of control or ownership. Tracts are managed for owners, but because they are viewed from a regional perspective, advantages may be gained in pooled buying and selling, in arranging export offers, in reducing logging and transportation costs, in sharing equipment, and in avoiding duplicating effort. Owners of land may enroll all or parts of their ownerships.
I have to address more people than the private owners of rural land. Most published forestry, wildlife, and outdoor recreational information is by public employees (international, federal, and state) and almost all of them have (appropriately) a governmental and public-land bias. Most staff is biased by their university experience and that biased by local funding and student employment potentials (federal, corporate, or private). Seeing and reducing the bias is a difficult task; it may be impossible to reduce it substantially. If a public agency or corporate entity wants to be involved in the Rural System, then an assumption of a single general public person must be assumed. It is appropriate that this " person" or any landowner will say " on this hand I want x but on the other hand I want y." Nevertheless, there has to be present the assumption of one decision maker. This requirement is not an expression of distrust of the government or of my asocial behavior. It is about the need for a single, consistent decision maker with a long planning horizon and a willingness to discuss making, not just spending, money. There must be a desire to achieve a written set of objectives, not just increased bureaucracy.
Perhaps large direct financial gains cannot be made from wood or other products from an ownership. Study after study continues to surprise researchers: financial gain is not the expressed primary aim of many owners. It is for many owners however, and for others, all of the non-financial objectives of ownership seem to me sooner or later dependent upon the financial condition of the owner, the rural land gain or loss being a part of that calculation. No matter what the stated objectives or questionnaire results, the ownership had better not cost too much! Ownership and a satisfactory condition are conditional on a strong net positive financial status.
Unlike in past efforts to suggest improved forestry to landowners, Rural System owners are not assumed to be ignorant or to need education. Most owners, as everyone, can learn more about forests and forestry and other land use, but most, as the old farmer-joke goes, " ain't farmin' half as good as I know how." Besides, the majority of land owners are now college educated. There are other reasons (than information or knowledge) for not doing superior land management. Rural System addresses these problems on the way to developing a modern rural tract under sophisticated management for the owner.
Why have private landowners not practiced good forestry… or other types of recommended rural land use? We do not need more studies to answer this question; study will not make them simplify their answers. The variance in such studies will be great. The mean will be meaningless. The reasons for poor forestry are about the same for the farmer with only pasture and crop land. Their lands were abused, their areas are too small, they do not have the range of knowledge of options, consulting costs seem high or funds are not readily available, and they do not know where to get advice. The reasons continue. The advice that they got was excessively general and not site specific, they are distant from mills or markets, they do not know where to get help in implementing advice perceived to be suitable, they could not financially take the advice or the help (borrow the money for or take the risk for implementing the advice), and usually (in the past) the advice was rejected because it was unrelated or at odds with their objectives or bits of misinformation.
The apparently high cost of private forestry and agricultural consultants or more specifically their advice, is, in part, due to the few customers and high overhead and expenses per customer. The Rural System concept stabilizes the owner's income, reduces costs, and by other incentives, makes the consultant's service affordable. It may have been affordable before, but since less than 20% of private forest harvests are now done under the guidance of a forester (1997), it seems that the appearance has been otherwise. One objective, not intended to be hidden, is the desire of the staff to move land to its highest long-term use and to bring more land under wise management. Any one of these above reasons is sufficient to prevent cost effective agricultural production being actively practiced by the private owner of small tracts. Variable results always suggest the need for more research. We do not need more study on this topic. Rural System addresses the reasons positively, allowing profitable superior farmland ownership to exist. It works for profitable total land use systems, partially because it changes the scale of operations - resources, knowledge, and location, number of tracts and periods, and moves from the farm to a conglomerate, from the farm to the world and regional markets and resources.
Rural System Tracts
Rural System Tracts are a key part of the Rural System concept. I have the strongest desire to explain the parts, principles, and processes of these things but I make the equally desirous decision to describe them in general, then to deal with their rationale.
Tracts are private land and under superior management, at least under a level of management equal to that of public and corporate lands, and significantly better than unmanaged lands. These are lands in a democracy with a market-based, free-enterprise system. Open to authorized state or federal inspectors, the lands are managed for the private benefits of the private owners. Regulations or policies on affecting production or practices will generally be opposed as unfair competition of government entities with the private Rural System enterprise.
Tracts are typically private lands (usually over 50 acres in size) managed for owners. Often they are lands of absentee owners. They may be designated units of public lands (refuges, parks, state or national forests, town-owned lands) managed under but because they are viewed from a regional perspective, advantages may be gained in pooled buying and selling, in arranging export offers, in reduced logging and transportation costs, in sharing equipment, and in avoiding duplicating effort. Owners of land may enroll all or parts of their ownerships. The Tract concept is complicated but contains elements of:
There will be other ways (e.g., testimony) of protecting the land owners and their Tracts from intrusions (e.g., impact analyses of powerline corridors and highways). Of course, " winning" in court or regulation and policy conflicts cannot be assured and an owner may elect to be included or not in such protective action (e.g., rejected when there is a desire to sell under land condemnation).
The Tracts are used for making planned long-term profits for the private owner and others. They are land managed under a level of management at least equal to that of public and corporate lands, and significantly better than unmanaged lands. These are lands in a democracy with a market-based, free-enterprise system. They are open to authorized state or federal inspectors. Land owners limit some of their uses, but computer-aided long-term profitability is the objective. Conventional land uses and a wide variety of other uses by informed paying participants take place on the land. Significantly, both the value of the land and its productivity are enhanced. Gains are made to land owners from all gains made within Rural System and distributed in proportion to the active indexed acres under contract as a Tract. Since more government services are increasingly being gained from private enterprise contracts, we may explore select units of state and federal land being brought under limited and special treatment as Tracts.
I discuss the potential financial benefits to the owner and other community advantages in Chapter 7. I continue here with major topics of what staff members do with the land for the owner, enterprise, and the region.
The Mapped Tract Ownership
Perhaps land just " is." Can't it just " be?" Must it be seen as some anthropomorphic " thing," all structural, dimensional, with the " hand of man" heavily upon it? Perhaps. For some people it can be. For some there may be special places and for many there may be preserved special places with minimum human intrusion or influence (but even preservation is now a major human act).
Owners of land decide about their land (unless it is taken from them by the courts; that decision makes it the ownership of another person or group). There may be groups of people who own land but they collectively decide and in each major instant of decision, the pounding of the gavel or the handshake, ownership is singular. This concept of singular ownership is important within modern Rural System management. It sounds much too simplistic. We do not start with a forest or an ecosystem or a watershed. We start with the mapped ownership, the working platform.
Each Tract and its border zone are carefully mapped and each part assigned an alpha unit number.
We clarify the boundary, a persistent surveying problem, somewhat aided by Global Positioning Satellite (GPS) technology. This is a costly operation and one not to be ignored for the long-term work of areas that will, if not now, likely be owned by a neighbor with whom cost-effective results can be achieved. We use named trees and natural objects of survey corners to aid in historical landscape interpretations.
Outward around the corrected and final map boundary line we cast an hypothetical border zone, typically 100 meters, and develop basic data and GIS mapping capabilities. The influence of work on Tracts of from nearby activities needs to be part of planning and activities. Animals, pathogens, pollutants, noise, and viewscapes are all largely independent of the costly developed boundary line. Influences of upstream and flooding effects, at least within this " highly relevant border zone" need to be a part of land use and risk/expected yield decisions.
Each unit of a tract is mapped as being in a currently designated use. Each evident mapable area may be in transition. Such areas have a temporary designation. They may be changed for many reasons.
Permanent use is a designation given to cultural sites and to areas not likely to change over 150 years (e.g., a large lake, a religious area). [Nothing is permanent as we can see from the pyramids and other archaeological and geographical evidence.] " Permanent" is assumed to be for the lifetime of the owner; planned rotation age; 50-year planning horizon; or a group assumed to exist in perpetuity. (When staff are working on public lands, specific legal definitions of such lands, different for each agency, are used.)
We can allow certain highly-valued conditions to persist. These are called reserved areas and we map them. We do not have to debate them. We leave the ancient forests, the legacy trees, the historic spots, and the graveyards on the ownership's working platform. While it may be possible to debate their persistence, we know they have alternative value but we do not yet care to spend much time discussing their value. We assume that they are not of inestimable value but temporarily of such great value that we cannot afford the time that we estimate will be needed to describe and document that difference to the satisfaction of more than three people.
They may some day become reserved volumes, but that is for later. The concept is for a part of an ownership. An area marked out for a planned pond or for a new structure for the near future may be a reserved area but it is typically called a withdrawn area (described below). It would be given special attention in any computer program otherwise computing the likely crop, pasture, or future forest yields of the total area over time.
Other people need not view the designation of reserved area or permanent use area as rational. There are many reasons why a field will always be a pasture; why that area will always be a pond, why that area will be in trees. The reasons may be listed, but they do not have to be. There is no law that requires a match of action with some person's expression of " rationality." Once a reserved area designation is made (or even hypothesized) then the cost or loss of benefits resulting from the designation can be evaluated. The use may be changed, but it is not likely unless there are clearly massive costs or losses due to such designation. Usually the difference will not " make any difference" ; permanent means permanent. An ancient forest stand is an example of a permanent use designation in most management plans. The Forest Stewardship Council Principles (#9) assert the need for management activities in high conservation value forests and that such activities shall maintain and enhance the attributes that define such forests (or areas.) Decisions regarding high conservation value forests are considered in the context of a precautionary approach, often using simulations.
Designated use was mentioned above. Such areas are also called current use or active areas, the current named condition or major function of a part of a Rural System Tract that is significantly different from its surroundings. It may be a forest type of a stand, a fenced part of a pasture, a road or pond, or the yard around the homestead. We designate two types of reserved areas.
Withdrawn areas are those for which an alternative use is actually or likely to exist and be implemented. An owner may " know" where a pond is to be built. The pond does not exist but the use of the land as a pond is assumed. The area is " withdrawn" from considerations and computations of forest or other land productivity for the immediate future. It may be included as a real pond in a total system analysis. Withdrawn areas are those no longer likely to produce typical farm products under any circumstances. These include large talus slopes, roads, trails, ponds, streams, developed campsites, loading and parking areas, heliports, permanent wildlife " clearings," and similar areas. The analyses of productivity of land, actual or potential, are done for the active areas-areas designated as neither permanent nor withdrawn. " Withdrawn" implies that areas are removed from any computations of purposeful or active production. These areas produce other products and perform other services that are viewed as specific named production areas (e.g., trail-user recreation) or they produce unnamed and " extra" benefits. Analyses are conducted on the total area but productivity-per-unit-area over time may be estimated separately for each type of use for the active areas.
After we designate the boundary of the working platform and map the border zone and " reserved areas," we can map lands of limited use or those unsuitable for specific practices. We need to " open wide" and continue to do the difficult mental work with the concept of the platform. The platform must have no assigned pre-conceived purpose or special use. We do not assume that if an area is in trees, that it should be a forest. Perhaps it should be, but we do not arrive at that conclusion until after our analyses. I do not intend to draw this line too tightly, for there are places that " are what they are." It would be silly to exercise on them, imagine them as something else. Glacial ponds and bogs, ancient forests, special structures and areas of historical significance are such places. It is difficult to mentally force a pasture into the concept of a forest; a forest into a crop field. Land use has changed and we too can change it. Much use is now the result of dozens of owner experiments over many years. It is typically the best they all could do with it after about a century. We must allow our minds and computer aids to explore a wide array of potential uses for tracts within the platform of the entire platform, even cyclic use. Typically, we reserve areas, accept the land use that now exists as a function of past decisions and work, its experimental uses and errors, and move ahead with optimization of the assumed major land use classes. We have to challenge and allow others to challenge and to accept computer solutions for what is best use for land units of the platform. We map land of limited use e.g., too steep for conventional timber harvesting equipment; areas unavailable due to topographic, ownership, wetland, or river blockage; inaccessible by low-cost roads; seasonally unavailable due to median snowfall depths. Unavailable for conventional use such as tree removals, these areas can be used by many of the enterprise groups of Rural System.
Once these named areas are mapped, the analyses are then conducted on the total area using alpha units. Productivity-per-unit-area over time may be estimated separately for each type of use for the active areas. This is done more precisely than ever before in the diverse rural environment by using such units.
Managing the non-wilderness is necessary. So is wilderness management (Hendee etal. 1993). Wilderness is conditional upon stable and managed socio-economic conditions. The private wilderness, though intended and thought to be permanent, is temporary if there is bankruptcy. I know that people long for experiencing such places. Knowledge that such places exist provides benefit to many. Because of natural predictable changes on a tract due to sequences of events (called " ecological succession" ) it is unlikely that any person will see approximately the same natural phenomena on the same tract. Nature has a slow cycle. In the Eastern US, it is probably about 150 years but we have no other records. What you see as a complex of plants and animals now, if left alone, will probably be about the same again in about 150 years. Each of us can visit around and see plant communities of different ages on different tracts of land. That's how we know… under natural conditions for forests and grasslands we can expect things to repeat themselves on the same tract. Important questions seem to remain: (1) what is it that we see and want that gives us the greatest benefits for survival and quality of life, (2) just what are those " natural conditions" and are they being changed by local and other human populations, and (3) am I changing them? Natural conditions are good and needed for study and other purposes and some must be preserved. The answers to the questions posed seem to me to be, no matter how reluctantly developed, to be (1) society's and family wants and needs are changing and, for now, those needs do not match up well with the expected natural state of this particular unit of the land; and (2) there are no longer any natural conditions unchanged by people since the glaciers receded (at least 10,000 years in the Eastern US); there have been massive changes in the landscape in the post-settlement period of the US in the past 400 years. There have been unmeasured and un-measurable changes since the loss of the bison, passenger pigeon, wolf, and cougar, American chestnut, and introduction of starlings and red fox and many insect species. We cannot return to the years when Cro-Magnon groups first slipped off the edge of the glacier into the conifer forests of the Northeast. We need to resist change on select areas (e.g., by placing them in Trusts or under special deed provisions; study them well; write about what we think that we have learned from them; and now restore, increase production, and manage the land units very, very well for the future.
Wilderness designation within Rural System work in no way excludes other uses but establishes conditions of extra productivity of many groups such as those of hiking, nature study, bird watching, and hunting.
Alpha Units: Fixed Locations Where Resources May Be Changing
Generalizations about land as many-factored and as capital begin to build the bridges and linkages among chemistry, physics and biology and economics to yield meaningful concepts about natural resources. These are usually seen as very physical. They are things of the working platform but there, we slowly perceive, are more that physical things. There are also words and song, ideas and art, inventions and historical interpretations. There are unlimited opportunities … discoveries to be made. From the working platform there are opportunities … benefits to be produced. To make such things happen, as never-before possible, we can use the Alpha Unit and computer power.
What if the Earth surface was divided into separately named units, each a column that was 10 meters by 10 meters wide and then extending1000 meters below the surface and 1000 meters above the surface (the approximate planetary boundary layer)? (It has been, the Universe Transverse Mercator map projection.) What if all of the land and resources could be considered as existing within this rectangular column, each a uniquely-labeled map cell or unit, each 10 meters by 10 meters? (Think of them as the 10-yard line on a football field ...plus a few feet, or 3 such widths being within a basketball court). Each is linked to data about its eight touching cells. This volume is an alpha unit.
What if ecologists know that there are 200 large animal species on most Virginia mountains, 2000 plant species, and 20,000 insect and soil organisms? (Other regions will have similar numbers and they are only used here to make a point.) Ecologists also now know from many studies that only 20 factors out of hundreds could give more that 80% control over or explanation of the variations usually encountered in systems undisturbed for about 50 or more years. (Evidence now exists that this is likely for a variety of species.) What if the 20 factors can be put into a GIS? (They can, and many have been, and some are for sale.) What if each factor was broken into only 5 gross categories along a scale? The combinations are 5 20 or about 95,367,431,000,000 potentially unique land units. There are only 12,019,000,000 land units of the 10 x 10 meter variety in the entire state of Virginia. In the databases for alpha units, we have separate maps or map layers, one for each factor.
We have studied the major ecological factors and their variability. We have had experience with Landsat, videography, and GPS. We have worked with old land surveys; we've tried to re-locate randomly-selected points. We've broken chain, paced distances, estimated crown coverage, and have watched peculiar numbers creep into basal area measurements as well as those of forage and wildlife sign. Based on these experiences, we have developed the rationale that the Alpha Unit is the most practical, smallest unit that has meaning in land analyses of land ownerships over 3 acres in size. Alpha Units are ecological units (including temporal and spatial concepts), also economic (e.g., expected yield and costs), also an esthetic unit. Each can also be analyzed as an energy-budgeting unit. It has costs of enforcement-the constraints of laws and regulations as well as patrol costs. These words, all starting with " e," comprise the five dimensions of the context within which Alpha Units make sense.
The chances are that each unit is unique. (The odds of that statement being wrong are about 1 in over 22 million ( i.e., 20 elevation classes x 6 aspects x 10 slope classes x 10 soil texture classes x 5 water-nearness classes x 5 ridge nearness classes x 5 fire history classes x 5 grazing history classes x 3 air-pollution event classes ). We already have or can readily get information about each such unit for any land unit. We may no longer need to aggregate and synthesize and combine data into a set of statistics (information for decision making, or why else should we get it?) about a population of areas. We have great computer power and can prescribe for the unique set of conditions within each unit. (We have the computers; we are working on the prescriptions.) Prescriptions that experts can now formulate can be made site specific, unique for each unique site, to increase production, avoid conflicts, reduce losses, reduce risks, increase statistical controls in experiments and the statistics of observations, and help assure desirable future conditions for future people. An idea will creep over landowners. It is that within the new world of computer software and hardware it is now possible to characterize every alpha unit and to explain differences and similarities in each. This ability creates an entirely new situation, absolutely unique in history, and unique in the abilities of the average resource manager.
The 10 x 10 alpha unit area as a part of Earth is very small. It exists over an imaginary column to the center of Earth. The distance to the molten iron center is about 3,960 miles (12,756 kilometers) at the equator. The mantle of Earth is about 2,000 miles thick and is composed of melted rock. The Earth crust (25 miles thick) is of particular interest and is where detailed geological and other analyses may begin. High-mountain watersheds and recreational areas (much higher) are of evident importance for their mineral resources and are of significance to some plants and animals. While most work and analyses are done at the surface, the volume includes the air, weather, and climate above the surface and beneath it mines, solution channels and caves, groundwater, and so-called " parent-material" of the soil layer. Satellite data are now available for such areas of the world and databases of other information can be located with and correlated with such areas and associated volumes. All of the land and resources can be considered to exist within the column, each a uniquely-labeled map cell or unit. These are like large floor tiles of the working factory. Alpha units do not have to have names. Numbers or codes are sufficient. If names are needed, a likely translation may eventually be developed (e.g., hypothetically, number 1245 to 1578 and 2323 are called SAF Type x; soil type 321 is equivalent to the Hillvill Silt Loam (which can then be linked to probable-soil-use types in the data base from the former SCS, the Natural Resource Conservation Service).
It is now feasible for an enterprise within Rural System (the GIS Group along with most resource groups) to operate on the basis of these small land units. Because of having specific information about each unit, staff can do the following:
We can now know from GPS almost exactly where we are on the surface of Earth. The center of each alpha unit is almost sure knowledge, a new condition for hunters and all others who have become a bit disoriented even in their well-known forest, wetland, lake, or expansive rangeland.
We use concepts of bounded systems, dodging the complexities and limitations of the " ecosystem" definition. I specify the system " context" in a practical way but as precisely as easily possible. For example, I speak of a pond and define it as all of the water and all that it may contain within the estimated volume, the top of which is the modal 5-year high water elevation. Others may include the wet soil zone, precipitation, even the watershed. We cannot include everything (though we may have been taught to do so (having bought from teachers a perpetual guilt trip). We are precise; timely; but change later, expanding or contracting as we learn the system and clarify the secondary objectives of clients.
We can do a type of site-specific management now. It is alpha-unit specific. Management is done on alpha units and collections of them. An alpha unit need not be only a land tract. It is part of the working platform, a space within which with ideas, investments, and willingness to take risks where the landowner can do almost anything. A unit called a " forest" may be, tomorrow, a parking lot. Cleared of trees, it is hardly a forest… but it might still be called one if the intended condition in a few years is that it will appear to be covered by trees. People can decide areas and their use and intended use. Of course there are limits and identifying and clarifying them is one of the quests of management. Narrowing the reasonable options becomes cost effective even at the speeds of modern computers. An individual or a society may decide that an area is not to be disturbed and thus the platform " produces" things, whatever they are, naturally, following natural sequences and flows.
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Alpha Units (AU): Unique Spatial and Temporal Resource Units for the Future |
We may call it wild, but what we observe on its surface results from a decision that people have made and they get " anything that occurs" without further investments or activities. " Wild" remains a word giving us problems. We can see the conflict because a quail that has been flushed from an intensively cultivated agricultural field is very wild. The bird however, is hardly a product of the wilds, and probably very much a function of a fallow nearby field, now overgrown, once intensively cultivated, and soon (by plan) to be moved back into cultivation. Wild songbirds occur in all of these areas. The areas are simply in a temporary " state of production." Their degree of wildness can be discussed, but I am no longer sure where such discussion may lead that will be useful or will have a reasonable payoff. Areas of alpha units, those midway-conditions of the land volume, have structure, dynamics, and relations. They are the evident volumes that provide opportunities for managers to produce or gain benefits.
Planners and managers are sometimes said to be seeking " the highest and best use" of land. This has multiple meanings and needs to be analyzed using different value system, even different metrics … and certainly for different groups and over different perceived periods. An area's use may change when an idea is encountered. Hills (1961) said " Since man changes his viewpoints regarding what is a suitable use for land whenever there is a change in his economic and social condition, it is necessary to establish the basic principles of land use on the capability of the land… under various combinations of circumstances." Thus the alpha unit, the productive column, may have actual or potential productivity over a stated period. Its potential may not be achieved due to rules, access, and other reasons… including the unwillingness of the owner to take risks involved with seizing the perceived opportunities. Whether a person implements the selected alternative presented by experts or a computer analysis determines the productivity of the alpha unit. Such activity, no matter how desirable to some people, may be constrained or limited by rules and regulations and even social conditions… as well as a perceived or actual threat.
Radloff and Betters (1978) saw that their land classification grouped individual sites having relatively similar characteristics. Using alpha units we can specify such characteristics a priori and analyze for areas where sets of characteristics occur then compare and correlate them with observations or expectations. Grouping causes us to lose information. We know the characteristics of each unit and can ask for a display, not in groups, but in whatever patterns they emerge. We believe we have over-grouped and over generalized in the past and that the reason(s) for doing so are no longer as relevant as they were once. No statistics for grouping or discriminating are needed; average values rarely occur in nature. We specify the known conditions and work from them
Forest type (or any land use type) is little more than an index, perhaps a dependent relationship, to one or more such nominal transitory resources. Soil names are similar to forest type names. In 1982, Jerry Ziewitz, a student and I investigated making a soils map of a county using the equivalents of alpha units. We knew that soil type was largely a function of surface geology, elevation, slope and the direction it faces (called aspect), nearness to water, and vegetative cover. We had GIS maps for each of these few factors and used them to classify each alpha unit in the county based on the soil characteristics and name for known alpha units in adjacent counties. We were displeased with our accuracy (about 70%) until a soil expert suggested that the maps to which we were comparing our results might have been weak. Our precision was much finer than typical soil surveys, some made in years past in haste and with tight budgets. Forest soils are rarely classified. We now can become more precise with GPS aids. We have great confidence in future work for describing well the soil types (probably with new names and numbers or pseudo-soil types) and their appropriate uses or limits for the individual landowner.
One conventional use of alpha units in Rural System is to make maximum differentiation using the fewest GIS map layers (resource-related factors) and models (e.g., logistic regression, expert system, and heuristics). This follows a principle of using minimum data for maximum information for decisions. The maps composed of the units may be used as any maps are used, often in a variety of ways.
Concept maps include:
Alpha units can aid in doing precise, competitive, profitable rural land management and escaping the tight hold that " communities," " ecosystems," " watersheds," " stands," and " compartments" now exercise on planning and field work. It does not replace them, only allows analyses at a precise level, and then allows grouping upward to meet other objectives. The phenomena within every unit may be modeled as a function of factors and processes of the unit but also neighboring and nearby units...and that may be in any direction or distance from a unit center (thereby including the mysterious, enigmatic " landscape ecology" ).
Rural System is an intense user of GIS. It produces maps of cartographic excellence for improved decision making, but also for profits from the maps themselves. Rural System is about how to make money from rural lands ... forever. It is regional, and incrementally improving. It is proprietary. Air pollution, geological and mineral, floodplain, and groundwater GIS work are massive fields and avoided at the start. Depositions and surface geology are early entries.
The uses of these map layers need to continually engage the premise that the unit is a valued volume that is changing. Every datum on birds, mammals, stream-months, or visitor opportunity can be displayed as the place of a resource. Each has a change rate (that may be zero) or a period. Each mapped number is likely to be changing, to have ongoing transition (Chapter 15) from one state or condition to another (also called ecological succession, tree growth, stand yields, and erosion rate). Each resource (whatever it is or is named) exists in a place and the alpha unit emphasis is transitory. The concept of a valued volume includes five temporal factors (other that the nominal resource itself)
Alpha units are places about which information on resources and their change are stored. They themselves are resources. They provide the spatial basis for unifying ecology and economics so that the results can be mapped and visualized by decision makers. The vegetation in most Eastern-US forests is a diverse mixture of natural groups of plants and animals that respond differently to environmental and biological conditions. Unlike in the western US, there is inconspicuous zonal variation. I believe that the variations are real but that the zones are not conspicuous because the differences are small and the consequences of knowing the differences are less. Technology is needed to see and separate the differences. However, more than technology is needed. Herein we develop an approach to differentiating land units on the basis of a set of factors, more than used in most past decisions and most with greater accuracy and abundance:
Daubenmire and Daubenmire (1968) devised a scheme for " land classification." We are attempting to suggest using the concepts that they developed, but to take an alternative path to classification, that of disaggregating and discriminating. Past efforts to classify land resulted in too few classes, easy to remember and use in the field, but inadequate to identify the evident types and to respond to the many different demands for a single classification system.
Alpha units can be grouped into classes and used by some managers (after training as suggested by the above list of concept maps) for:
1. planning
2. making decisions
3. making ecological studies
4. mapping vegetation for many reasons
5. evaluating for sale or purchase
6. explaining and predicting forest growth
7. explaining and predicting susceptibility to diseases
8. explaining browse for game
9. understanding natural succession
10. providing a framework within which to relate additional basic or applied biological studies
11. locating sites where 5 factors indicate where walnut groves might be planted.
12. developing places where viewing might be enhanced or encouraged.
13. designating " let-burn" areas for wildfires.
14. finding likely areas for threatened, rare, or endangered species X (e.g., the northern flying squirrel example by McCombs 1998, salamanders by Klopfer 1998).
15. mapping tree species suitability, primeness, or to-be-avoided areas
16. selecting areas based on primeness for wildlife clearings and habitat developments
17. comparing areas based on Shannon-Weiner diversity index values
Mueggler (1988) observed that " intensive management of these wildlands requires an ability to recognize the units of land and vegetation with similar production capabilities and similar response to management activities." While recognition of these units is well accepted, we can now with hand-held computer in the field, enter location and factors and even the uneducated can tell the productive capabilities of a site.
Hundreds of factors may be used but a few powerful factors to which most wildland phenomena respond and that can be well mapped are used first. Not to include economic factors (powerful factors, far exceeding the role of ecological factors in decision-making about rural land processes and programs and land-use development) to which land phenomena respond seems narrowly silly. The factor-screening process is critical and linked to knowledge of ecosystems, forest and wildlife production, economics, and the statistical concepts within stepwise regression and sensitivity analyses. A representative factor list is long and separate map layers are developed for each factor with information stored for each alpha unit. They may then be used singly but usually in combinations:
1. Slope
2. Elevation
3. Aspect (2 types)
4. Transformed Aspect
5. Slope/aspect unification
6. Landform or relief
7. Slope Position
8. Distance from Stream
9. Stream or Pond
10. Watershed Boundary (600 acres +)
11. Wetland (several classes)
12. Pseudo-soil units
13. Soil texture class
14. Age since wildfire
15. Surface geology
16. Land Cover (land use)
17. Administration: state, county, planning district, river basin, wildlife agency and natural resource regions
18. Temperature (Mean, max, min, range, total annual, degree days)
19. Growing-season days (frost-free days)
20. Total precipitation within the growing season
21. Adjusted probable monthly precipitation (mean, maximum, and minimum)
22. Mean growing season degree days (Temperature summations)
23. Hours in topographic shadows in the growing season
24. Phenology Index (Hopkins' Bioclimatic Relationship)
25. Presence of springs and seeps; distance from such places
26. Major disturbances (roads, structures, quarries)
27. Canopy coverage (%) classes
In select areas, correlations may likely be found among fire maps, basal area, last-10-year tree growth, stem density, canopy coverage, percent soil cover, elevation range, occurrence of broken tree tops (storm damage), grouse flushes, and deer sign abundance.
Other that the above list, single-factor maps include: 2000 separate plant maps, 60 species-specific tree species suitability maps, 200 animals, fog drip, monthly prevailing wind directions, probably stumpage, fire risk, wildfire loss probability, cemeteries, mines, and quarries, lunar light and shadows, sampling intensity, prescribed harvest per acre in a year or 5-year period, hunters per acre, anglers per stream reach, stream side zones.
Such single-factor maps can be conceived as "spectral bands" in the sense of classical remote sensing and combined using those procedures, but we need to think of them as factor maps and progress to using them in models. Factors can be used in models in the following pattern:
Resource Map = a + b (Map Factor P) + c (Map Factor Q) - d (Map Factor RKZ) + e
where a specific named resource map is made (e.g., sites suitable for warm-season grasses), alpha unit by alpha unit, for an entire ownership. The hypothetical
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| Each factor is mapped and factors are combined into equations representing conditions or functions at any point or alpha unit, y. |
We have developed for preliminary land analyses a list of about 20 factors and made paired comparisons of importance (a contingency table; identical columns and rows). Then we assign importance to each pair and examine the displayed value (if any) of maps made of two factors, then interesting three-factor combinations.
The classical map resulting from the alpha unit presentation or other GIS applications may not be important. The summary data that accompany maps are often the primary payoffs. The information from the maps (totals and proportions of area by type, counts, etc.) become the inputs to a range of decisions (e.g., summary data for one application might be the percent of the total ownership in forests with north-facing slopes greater than 15% on within 10 chains of existing roads, a map which requires the joint use of slope, aspect, roads, cover, and property boundary factor maps (all assumed to have previously been mentally integrated splendidly with perfection by every land advisor who may not have even had an aerial photograph of the tract?!)). We know that we can now do better than the average land owner. We now have new roots to our knowledge about the platform and thus about increased profits from rural lands for their people.
Hand-held field computers with software and GPS unit can provide improved field analyses. For example, with 30 sample points (locations registered with GPS) that say that the tree species " sourwood" is present, it is then possible to say " make a map of where the conditions now present on those 30 sites also exist." You have a potential sourwood map! (at least for the property…and then for the region that you define as we collect more data.) This is a remote sensing concept of " supervised classification" that is typically applied with four or more spectral bands. The same procedures can and need to be used with the factor " bands," the map layers.
The alpha unit concept may be viewed as just another form of vegetation or ecological classification, another one created over years of research (e.g., Wirsing and Alexander (1975), Paysen et al. (1980), , G.A.J. Scott (1995)). These classification systems have been asserted to be valuable in making a variety of decisions, discussing the processes of the land, and communicating to people the common elements of land and the changes likely to occur with treatments or due to natural trends. They are said to be of value in understanding and management in almost every area of resource management. Mueggler (1988) said that habitat types, in his work, were based on potential natural vegetation, with understory used to clarify series within each type. Classification reduces data to information much as statistical analyses convert data into statistics. If too few statistics are used, then information useful for analyses and decisions can be lost. An average without its variance, for example, may supply inadequate, even erroneous information about a population. The data were present and needed to compute the average and failing to compute the variance might result in faulty diagnoses or prescriptions. Similarly, gross classifications (e.g., into Society of American Forests " forest types" ) can result in great loss of information, especially when such types are used or intended for use by different resource interest groups.
Alpha units can display the result of classification. Their difference is in the procedure of their use and display. Maps are costly, difficult to produce, and (realized by few people) limited to about 20 colors that can be readily discerned by normal people. There may be the need to display 53 different classes of resources but they must be regrouped (not for ecological or other reasons, but because only 20 can be effectively be mapped!). A unit, for example, may have one, each, of 10 slope classes, 10 elevation classes, and 8 aspect classes. There are known, by definition, 800 unique classes for these 10 x 10 map cells and in some areas of the world there may be at least one pixel or map-cell or unit having the characteristics of one of the 800 " classes." In some area of interest there may be only 326 different units. There may be thousands of units on a single mapable area with the characteristic of: slope of class 3, elevation in class 4, and aspect class 7. The special character of the computer mapping capability is that a map may be made of only places having the specified set of characters (for example, the 3 mentioned above). The map will have only 2 " colors," one symbolizing places that have exactly those characteristics, and the other, places having all other characteristics. If there are, by design, 10 levels of magnitude assigned for each factor and there are 20 factors, then the number of potentially distinctive classes is merely 1 x 10 20. (There are 1.26 x 10 11 acres of Earth surface, water and land, 5.1 x 1012 surface units the size of an Alpha Unit. The number of potential classes that might be created with only 20 factors exceeds the potential area within which to fit them.)
Every unit of land within a map cell is potentially unique, given that there are far more than 20 factors at work in each unit and permutations (related to the sequence of effects of factors) add greatly to the potential number. Not needing to map one point, a request may be made to list the coordinates of all sites having a set of factors (e.g., 12). It is likely that only 2 to 3 places would be listed that have those factors in exact combination. Thousands of spots, however, might be mapped having a range of factors (e.g., between r and s, above g, less than h, etc.). While my emphasis has been on increasingly small areas, these same areas can be aggregated or zones and spaces around them investigated to achieve the desired scale for so many Rural System problems.
Data may not be estimated for each unit. For exampel, Klopfer (1998) estimated mean temperatures for every 300 x 300-m block of Virginia. Daily temperatures do not vary significantly between the 300- and included 10-meter blocks. These were far more superior estimates that ever available. Each alpha unit, all 900 within these blocks, would be loaded with the estimated temperature. As algorithms, data, time, and funds become more available (if ever) then the models may be improved and unit-specific estimates made. We hypothesize that the following relations will be readily modeled:
Depth to bedrock = f (distance to water, distance to ridge, geologic type, and slope position)
and
Age of forest stands (constrained by Landsat reflectance as non-sapling class) = f (major timber type, distance from roads, slope, and maximum age)
These relations can be estimated in the field but in order to map large areas before going to the field (as needed within The Trevey (Chapter 15) a map showing such approximations can be useful. Fieldwork with GPS can improve the estimates.
Animal population densities respond more to tree age than to type, and more to type than to factors of edge or interspersion. Difficulties persist in stating the age of an uneven age hardwood stand but this suggests the reasonable limits on the approximations and estimates. Since vegetative weight is related to tree species and weight is related to the known specific gravity of each type of wood, then maps of weight can probably be made. It may be that the site characteristics where total weight (actual or potential tree phytomass) is produced and site ecological equivalencies and tradeoffs can be estimated based on tree weight.
Great difficulties and past errors have attended using aspect measures, estimates, and analyses. We have a paper describing alternative transformations of aspect in to 2 types, Type 1 tending to be east-west, Type 2, north-south. Type 1 accommodates coastal and continental influences, Type 2, latitudinal influences… in addition to typical solar radiation phenomena. A solar-related aspect transformation is suggested as a third map alternative (the caution being that without transformations of data, 360 degrees northward will not compute well with 1 degree northward). These may be project or site-specific data or they may be computed for storage and later retrieval (without further computations).
An underlying assumption with the units is that factors are (or may be) non-linear as suggested above). In most cases simple logistic relations are sought. In some cases, thresholds are used (e.g., the biological effects after water freezes). Strong regressions are likely within ecosystems, therefore using the most easily gotten and least costly factor maps as independent variables is a common strategy.
Users of alpha units typically will identify a vegetation type, dominant plant, or an observation such as presence of animal sign, then seek characteristics of that site … and similar ones. Often the map can become more accurate as observations are accumulated. Unlike vegetation mapping which uses the vegetation (e.g., plant associations) as the integrated expression of all of the factors at work on such sites, (e.g., Carleton and Maycock 1980) staff can use the alpha units with observations of vegetation, animals, etc. to point to factors operative in the past and present on observable conditions. Of course we seek high accuracy and to improve progressively, but the standard is not what is possible but what data we have (or know) now. Often that criterion suggests statistical alpha levels of 0.51 may be suitable, temporarily. Few people realize that many things in nature have very high variability; it is natural. Sequence of events in nature, more than factors present, produces differences. Achieving a good "fit" is unnatural. Carleton (above) found a site moisture-nutrient gradient and a general fertility-productivity gradient affected understory vegetation. Understory-overstory coincidence is related to site factors and many abundant herbs seem indifferent to dramatic canopy change. Consistently observers study the adult plant, rarely the conditions likely at the time of seed rain or germination.
Capital and its Dominant Elements
Either it in its entirety or components of the working platform can be viewed as capital. The perspective of working capital can enrich the dominant physical components of capital, solar radiation, soil, and the fundamental energy collecting structures anchored in the soil, the vegetation or net primary productivity, NPP. Dominant or not, there are many types and functions of capital.
Land is capital in many forms. Rural System did not seek to " buy farms," one evident way to gain capital. It sought to secure long term contracts for land use and development within Rural System Tracts. On these Tracts the capital of space and opportunity could be had. For the business person, relations can be learned and sought among the elements of capital. They are evident in simple examples like an expert, a new technology, and raw materials. None of the three are very meaningful alone. The person can consult, the technology can remain on the shelf, and the raw materials may be sold in bulk. Put together, a highly profitable enterprise can be created. Only the arrangement, the unification, the capital construct has changed.
Synergism
Let me digress to re-emphasize soil and an amazing number of relations called synergism within Rural System (also discussed in Chapter 17 Marketing and in Chapter 15, Processes). When does 1 + 1 + 1 =4? The answer: When the " ones" are triangles and they are arranged to form a pyramid-like form (a tetrahedron.) The three joined together at their edges result in a forth triangle --- for free. The end result may be called a synergistic effect. Synergism occurs when our results of a relationship is are greater than the expected sum. A typically cited example is the synergism of pesticides that when applied together, are more lethal than expected from the summation effect. We keep seeing fours when we expect threes. The examples in ecology are not very clear for they are quite complex. The soil-water relations provide several examples that are intuitive. Soil texture was said to be essential. So is moisture, and of course so are nutrients. Nutrients become available to plants in solutions held in the spaces within soil. The spaces result from the combination of particle sizes called texture. Good texture in a soil without sufficient moisture is worth little. Nutrients without moisture or texture also are meaningless. The complex, dynamic relations of all three make the system work. Their unified effect is notably synergistic in what pioneers recognized from our beginning as " good, deep, rich, black soil."
In ecological communities that are ravaged annually or periodically (e.g., coastal wet lands and river bottom deltas) mature systems never develop. These are called " pulse communities" and are highly turbulent. They develop recognizable traits and are nameable. They are usually rich in various seeds and propagules, part of the pulse input that is also rich in nutrients, far more than can be readily used. The communities are limited by the same conditions as other communities, usually primarily sun. Many plants cannot tolerate the excess water or ocean salts. The results have been adaptive strategies, including re-sprouting vigor, special root structures, and growth of tall straight trees.
To " compete," vines get to the sun by climbing on the available physical structure of the tall trees. They use an alternate capital structure to achieve the same end. Information-related companies seem to me to be viney, flourishing on the enormous structures of satellite and wire-related structure. There are turbulent environments (like rivers) in which the classical product life cycle will not fit, any more than classical succession does not fit the local river bank or the powerline right-of-way that is sprayed regularly with herbicide. The market in such situations requires continuous effort, special adaptations to use the surpluses when they are available (peak load phenomena), attention to major limits (like sunlight), and joint use of whatever structure that can be built (at least using shift-work as the simplest suggestion; seasonal rental of space; use of parking areas as storm water control areas and ice rinks, etc.)
Transportation
Another form of capital is adjacency or access. If you've ever snow-shoed you know the stresses of breaking trail. " Stresses" can be thought of as energy costs. In the western US, elk trails are abundant in the snow. They walk in the same paths because it is efficient. It costs elk less energy to move along trails than through the open snow to move from one place to another. The same is true for summer trails. The way is cleared, the rough spots smoothed out (rough spots cost animals and people energy). Remember the exhausted feeling the last time you tripped badly, almost fell? Trails make the remaining tripping places more clear. The existence of a trail means at least several have come this way (and probably returned.) A trail thus contains information about what is ahead, about the history of the area, and the fate of prior travelers. The older and deeper the trail, the more information it can transmit. I don't really think elk know all of this. I hardly know a more mindless creature than an elk: beautiful yes, but dumb. But they are survivors! They know how to use information. "Follow trails" is not a very complicated brain pattern. Eat bushes and seek the opposite sex; that's about all the population needs to know for lasting success.
Build transportation systems and units when energy costs are low (roads, trails, waterway facilities) has to be a modern command. They are essential for land restoration, cultivation, management, and harvests and moving products and services … all of the benefits… to people. The physical system will serve even better after moving ideas and images are left to the electronic world.
Behaviors and Information
Animals have evolved to have a series of behavior patterns that have survival power. These patterns are called instincts, but we view them as complex sets of information. " If you do it this way you'll survive," is a message and it doesn't have to be pondered, re-learned, or passed along by some naked gray-hair squatting by the campfire. An animal on a golf course can walk almost anywhere it wants. Flat, uniform areas do not lead to trails. There is no energy-cost differential. But trails form on golf courses and even open plains. Animals wander around and then for no apparent good-reason they follow each other. There's some intuitive good sense to go where one has already gone. It is a little better to go there than where none have gone before. Over the eons, playing the odds of following is a good and winning strategy. The play is not necessarily the best. In fact the odds are that it is not the best strategy. Not just paths but similar followings can be observed. " I ate these berries and I'm not dead" states the brave cave person around the campfire, and that knowledge is passed on to the children as part of their heritage. That knowledge, capital itself, provides access to the most fundamental of all capital, i.e., energy.
The business implications are simple but as difficult for business people to follow as for animals to follow a new trail. Trails are good to follow but so is looking around for a better one. The chances are great that one is in sight. Studies reported in the sociological literature suggest that sons of corporate leaders become corporate leaders. Many sons and daughters follow in their parents' trades, hobbies, or professions. That " chip off the old block" quip has fundamental ecological survival value behind it.
I would like to raise dairy goats for lots of reasons, but probably never will because I don't know enough and cannot learn enough quickly enough to do a profitable job. I did, though, raise show pigeons for my dad as a kid and wouldn't have the slightest reluctance to start raising them again. I know a lot about pigeons; I have information. More importantly, I have a comfortable feeling about the fundamentals. I'd follow a trail, a very small rut, and may never be able to get out of it. I suspect that I am like the farm boy, uncomfortable in leaving the land.
I've watched a starling (those raucous, black speckled, imported escapees) search for a nesting place in a back yard. Long since separated from its parents, only in the yard for a few days, the bird examined places. All at once I felt sorry for it. I have had a tough job deciding on apartments; on selecting a seat in a crowded cafeteria. I've felt anxious, nervous, losing energy because of uncertainty. I can imagine buying a large tract of land and having to decide where to build a house (like a starling must build a nest). There are so many factors to consider! Every pioneer on the U.S. frontier had to decide on where was the best place. Starlings and other birds have built-in information. They have a genetic pattern in their brain, a template, and they go home-site hunting without education, or a guide book, instructors, or mommies. They have such short life- expectancies they had better be right the first time or they'll not succeed as a species. They are obviously very successful. It is the genetic template, the pattern, that speaks to these otherwise silly looking blackbirds and says that the hole had better be larger than X, smaller than Y, a cavity deep enough and large enough for adult and chicks, shaded, not tilted so it will rain in, a small hole or two so it will drain and not flood the young, not too hot, not too cold, not sticky, not infested with wasps, and not readily accessible to kids, cats, or snakes. That's an awful set of requirements and it is fortunate they do not have to articulate them, list them, check them off, and rank each available site. Can you imagine where the people at your last committee meeting would have placed a nest?! Information is capital!
For businesses, the messages from nature are to honor experience, capture it, use apprentices, plan overlapping service so no knowledge is lost, and pass on all knowledge gained to another. Document, document --- at least make a TV tape of the motions of the craftspeople. Historical analyses, done in the name of capturing information, allow corporate and community history to take on meaning and to replace the pitiful piles of conjecture and ant-heap anecdotes now lying around called history.
Information
Information is one of the few things that can be used and not used up. Information is a type of energy. The businesses that will succeed well will be those that use this basic concept. The doctor, teacher, and lawyer are examples. What they know is their resource. The more cures they dispense, the better. The cure never goes away.
Document, document --- at least make a TV tape of the motions of the craftspeople. Historical analyses, done in the name of capturing information, allow corporate and community history to take on meaning and to replace the pitiful piles of conjecture and ant-heap anecdotes now lying around called history.
I remember a tough boys' club leader who in frustration would occasionally yell at his boys as he tried to teach. " You might as well listen, 'cause it is a sure thing I'm not going to be any dumber when I leave!" The statement had the edge of raw wisdom that occasionally worked on the boys. Our computer data bank whispers to us in the dark hours: you had better use me; I'll not be emptier tomorrow. You cannot " use me up." The cost of each piece of stored information goes down with each use.
In ecological systems, the information content is most clearly seen in heredity. There are a few other areas such as behavior (e.g., ruffed grouse drumming, turkeys strutting and displaying) where the sexual signals are unmistakable, and in the development of some ecological communities where the pattern of change is so well established that it is predictable. In business there is a message in the above for the marketing group. In the information of an explicit logo, of a clear image for a company and its work or products, there is capital. The standard colors, proportions, symbols, letters, scales, all communicate.
What the business person desires shapes the selection of all of these. The picture that says a thousand words is the same as the business or corporate image that speaks thousands of words. Instead of saying 50 words, only 7 of which can be read from a speeding car, the wise business person selects a sign or symbol and uses it consistently and widely to assure that everyone knows it. Consistency, no noise in the information, is the rule. An animal that displays with ruff extended and then rolls over will not last long. The signals are not mixed in the survivors. A ruff-display says, " look out, I'm ready to fight and, even though I don't want to, I shall."
Products can be related to these information states and to the information state of an exotic animal plopped into a new environment. The animal may survive or not depending on how it adapts and uses information (deduces) from the old environment to survive in the new environment. The frequent failure of efforts to stock or introduce animals to new areas is evidence that these creatures have poor information transfer capability. Not so, humans.
Some businesses have seen that costs decline as sale volume increases. This is nothing more than the traditional concept of economies of scale, i.e., large operations can produce products at lower cost per unit because fixed costs can be spread over a greater number of units. Achieving these economies of scale requires learning and trial-and-error experience. The information accumulated by an organism or a system, the learning curve, is similar to the community biomass accumulated during succession. Reducing costs result from improving labor efficiency, specializing tasks, improving methods, increasing equipment efficiency, standardizing products, re-designing products, all of which are information-related acts. The more experience, the greater the background research, the more mature the staff, the greater are the chances for success of the new product.
Scale
Economies of scale and the learning curve may be what account for the changes in ecological community energy budgets that change over time. Economies of scale are directly tied to the concept of decreases in entropy in an ecosystem (Chapter 15). The learning curve in students represents the increasing acquisition and use of information. Social, legal, professional, and technical " rules" in a product industry are underdeveloped in the developmental stages of the product life cycle. These rules or chunks of knowledge become increasingly developed as the product market matures.
The rules help product organizations control their environment by allowing them to predict consequences from certain actions. Rules are capital. The better the rules, the better the adjustments to environmental demands. The rules add to market stability. Without well defined rules, the environment is usually highly turbulent and unstable. For firms to mature, they have to establish a well-defined set of rules regulating competitive behavior and specific polices dealing with ethical conduct and other organizational matters. Organizations in the developmental stages of a product are highly vulnerable to environmental threats and disturbances. This vulnerability diminishes as the product matures. Vulnerability is high because competing organizations are operating in an environment which is highly turbulent. Product organizations are virtually dependent on parent organizations for resources; the firms are rarely in a position fully to predict environmental contingencies, and rules are not yet defined in the new market. Parent organizations which provide support for the product organization need to expect a great deal of entropy in the early development stages. This noise or frustration and waste will gradually decrease as the product(s) moves toward maturity.
The beauty of the beasts and other parts of nature is that they seem to know when to quit - almost everything. Elephants don't carry around filing cabinets, not even floppy discs. They have selective feedback mechanisms that prevent them getting and storing too much information. Animals' brain sizes are amazingly correlated to the complexity of their environments-just enough, not too much. Animals screen out noise, useless or irrelevant information. Every leaf falling in a forest is not an attacking hawk to the squirrels there. They filter the noise and operate on genetically stored information and a little information added (learned) from watchfulness.
Too bad people haven't learned well how to add information and screen out noise. The successful businesses have. They understand sampling, how to select representative pieces of information, not collect everything. They compress information into statistics and graphs. They do analyses to determine sensitive factors, things badly needed; they leave behind the " nice-to-know," stick with " need-to-know." They create models of the enterprise, computer simulations. The simulation becomes the embodiment of all equations about processes and flows, relations, and trends. The equations or parts of the model dynamically change as new data become available, are converted into information, and it is raised to high order information inside the functional model that is used to aid in decision making. " What will be the consequences of a new machine at spot S? of replacing Mary? or forming a separate company with group G?" These are questions a complex simulation of a firm can aid in answering. They are much like animal questions of " what if I go down pathway P?" The animals don't need a computer model. The one eaten by a cougar down pathway P may wish (for an instant) he had one, but these decisions in the wild are highly spontaneous, almost automatic, like responses of good athletes.
Successful businesses merge files, reduce them to an electromagnetic form to reduce storage costs, have planned information purges. They synthesize data into information, usually in the form of mathematical models or computer models. Information can kill a business, like an appetite uncontrolled. Traditional analysis of the product life cycle entails tracking a measure of industry sales overtime. An ecological perspective of the cycle emphasizes three variant concepts: (1) gross production, (2) maintenance costs, and (3) cumulative investment. Gross production in the ecosystem reflects products manufactured and or marketed, not necessarily sold. There is energy employed in manufacturing and marketing a certain volume of product units. Maintenance costs include the energy employed to maintain existing structures and to provide the organization that allow production and sales, the supporting structures allowing future growth. Another way of looking at production involves costs relegated to growth (gross production) versus costs relegated to basic maintenance. In the developmental stages of ecological or business systems, both types of energies are used at an accelerating rate, however, " growth" energy is used in greater proportion than maintenance energy.
Communities and Structure
One property of successful enterprises is that they have adequate capital, the structure, software, real " stuff," that the system can show as results in terms of investments in human resources, a channel network, building brand awareness, preference, and intention to adopt the product by consumer groups.
The concept of total community structure as capital has significant managerial implications. Instead of evaluating product performance in terms of sales and profit, product managers are urged to think in terms of total system ability to do work or achieve objectives over many years, perhaps to the planning horizon. How much more capital did we accumulate in the last period? What kind?
How much competitors invest in a product or service can determine the growth in consumer interest in such services and thus may be beneficial to all producers. Rural System simply wants a major share of that market. Reacting too vigorously against competitor organizations may hide the fact that a certain amount of collective investment by all competitor organization is needed to insure the growth and eventual stability of the product market. Think of the structure of an ecosystem-trees, layers, streams-but in business physical facilities, equipment, staff, resources, etc. There are benefits from diversity, achieving a large scale, the benefits from widespread acceptance of what is normal or expected.
Financial resources are used to add structure to the firm. Structure is cumulative like bricks in a building. There are contacts, reputations, brand awareness, and community position. There are subtle " chips" that managers gain in dealings and negotiations over time. Of course there are buildings and equipment, but there are also laws and regulations, the social capital, in which industries must invest by testimony, lobbying, and other means. Even more subtle is the role for competitors. In ecological communities, trees are said to be competitors. They may compete for light, moisture and nutrients. Foresters and orchardists go to great trouble to plant trees so they do not compete with each other but so that they will achieve full utilization of available resources and economies of scale. Foresters prefer some trees competing for (we prefer " simultaneously seeking" ) sunlight because it makes them grow tall and straight and each protects others from wind storms. In mature forests, trees together shade the boles or main stem. Without such shade, the logs would grow leaves and small branches, " feather out" foresters say, and the resulting holes and stain destroy the value of otherwise clear boards that may result from such trees. There seem clear parallels with singular or " lazy" corporations who may not have allies to fight adverse legislation or tariffs or other wars.
Platform Aggregates
Land may not produce benefits for the owner in isolation but when each Rural System tract is part of a system of working platforms, a system of desired scale, each unit becomes an element in a total productive system. Managing small groups of land ownerships is too many-factored and difficult for the average landowner. Managing the single tract well is a daunting task. There is no question about why managing many tracts in a region as an economic unit has not been done in the past. Part of the answer is that the need was not perceived as being very great. People at the margin were being required to invest when they could not. Risks seemed high. Major sociological, religious, and ethnic principles about independence, land ownership, and self identity have been in play. People were concentrating on survival. Communications have been too difficult in the past. Now with computer decision aids, databases, GPS and the Internet, the work has already been demonstrated feasible. There remain questions of how to escape the force fields of the economic margin and the sociological " laws." Rapidly changing financial conditions have a profound impact on what is acceptable behavior. Pooled uses of data, joint use of equipment, bidding economies, the Q Works functions, group buying, and improving planning (The Trevey) are small steps away from that frightful margin.
In the same way that the ownership is a map of alpha units, the potentials of a single ownership may be considered as if they were one in a set of tracts under Rural System management. For example, if there is no buyer for 5 bales of hay from one platform, the hay is worthless. When that same 5 bales becomes part of a field of 200 bales with a buyer, the bales take on value… not because of fertilizer, cultural practice, or insect protection, maybe not even movement to a central place, but because of Internet marketing and achieving an economy of lot-size by the Rural System enterprise. Now, with e-catalog marketing, assembling bales of hay (or any product) is no longer a step in the production process. Bales and other products of the working platform can be marked and then shipped to the buyer as parts of each order.
Fencing
Fencing, almost impossible to produce or install cost effectively on one tract, becomes a valuable commodity supplied by a group within Rural System. Fences have different functions depending on the side on which you stand. They can allow land to be productive, the same land to produce no benefits. The process of fencing, itself, becomes a service function for the working platform.
Solar Radiation
Whether decided or not, solar radiation drives these natural systems and conditions of human space, reserved or not. We know well that solar radiation drives these natural systems and while it may be " given" or " fixed," nevertheless we model it for each alpha unit to assure managerial control over (1) receptive surface topography, (2) receptive surface color and reflectivity (albedo), (3) growing seasons and sunlight reception during those probable periods, (4) changing air-quality effects, and (5) major periodicities and changes in photosynthetically-active spectra.
The sun or its light cannot be controlled or managed in any active sense, but (1) its energy reception on Earth can be controlled by changing the topography or surface cover, (2) changing air quality, and (3) making optimal decisions for the system among available areas (spots or alpha units) based on their present energy reception and that is desired.
Net Primary Productivity - NPP
Humankind now seems to use more than 40 percent of the planet's net primary productivity (NPP), the total amount of the sun's energy fixed by green plants. Humans now (2004) consume about one-third of all terrestrial net primary production. Use rates are increasing, suggesting great future uncertainty in the face of human population increase and per capita average consumption.
A major primary objective of several Rural System Groups is to build phytomass. Rural System will address describing and eventually modeling all of the probable natural vegetation at a site, usually within alpha units. The weight of such vegetation is called " gross primary productivity" by ecologists. Except for minor amounts used in plant metabolic processes, the remainder is plant growth and storage collectively called " net primary productivity,". The result of this complex productivity " process" is plant mass. That is the food stock of all animals of all types. Crop specialists are interested in NPP but usually only specific parts such as grain or tubers. The Rural System person is interested in these commodities and their yield but also other specific, measurable, accountable benefits that can be gained from the same land area on which the net financial gain occurs. Different strategies can result in the same net returns (the systems principle of equifinality).
Living plants use the decayed substance of their plant and animal associates. There are many ways to achieve NPP to meet human needs. " Packaging" of phytomass has different human and ecosystem values. This display of equifinality is important to the modern Rural System manager for it is a challenge to find among the results, the least costly (money and energy) and lowest risk pathway to production.
Fundamental ecologists seem most interested in NPP but we work with it and a derivative from it. We use NPP as a maximum; it is solar-input determined and limited (Sharma, S. and S. P. Singh 1996). No concept suggests greater than NPP (like 100 percent engine or mechanical efficiency), so it can be used as a maximum value expressing a relative standard. Site specific and cumulative expected Rural System yields can be compared to maximum NPP for any site. A score using this baseline can be created and used with other scores expressive of total system performance.
People working within Rural System and those dependent upon it are usually interested in specially-valued parts of NPP. By using NPP or its expansion to P*, Rural System can then analyze approximate costs associated with fossil fuel inputs to the Rural System and the costs related to gaining desired system production and loss reduction (e.g., erosion control, pesticides, and pollution control) and management (the cost of positive or negative change).
We learn from studies of plant aggregates that for most of them when they are under recent relatively undisturbed conditions by people, they can be maintained or changed in desired directions if we
An index for this action, net Rural System production, can be theorized as:
P* = NPP + CI - R - CO
where
P* = net estimated annual Rural System production
CI = carbon inputs
CO= carbon outputs
R= Respiration
NPP makes available energy to other parts of our bounded systems. The energy is stored as phytomass or organic matter or is exported to other nearby systems (markets, groundwater, atmosphere, rivers). We continually seek to understand the system balance formulated as the equation:
Solar Energy Source to the system = unknown loss + entropy + losses to cultivation or land disturbance + specific contributions (e.g., ground water) + yield of commercial plant parts + phytomass of other above-ground plant parts + root mass
In natural or wilderness conditions, inputs and outputs of carbon are small. For agricultural and intensively used and worked Rural Systems, carbon inputs (e.g., manure) and outputs (e.g., logs, detritus) may be very large. For natural forested systems, P* is positive, for it reflects carbon gains but all such systems are not positive or carbon accumulators. In natural systems, the factors affecting carbon accumulation, though confounded by a host of relations, are fairly well known:
Increased shading - loss
Increased temperature - loss
Increased transpiration - loss
Increased evapotranspiration - gain
Reduced evapotranspiration - water flux increase, thus loss to groundwater
Increased erosion - loss
Increased root decay - loss (soil creep)
Increased streamflow - losses high, gains low
In agricultural fields, there is carbon loss as a result of cultivation and it only becomes positive after additions of organic mulch etc. The carbon decline and related nutrient losses are exponential (described by the negative logarithm).
We know that nitrogen is easily lost and must be added as needed and so we manage for its natural buildup in nitrogen-fixing plants. Nitrogen requires either high additions (as in manure) or nitrogen fixation by plant complexes. The legumes are well known for fixation but other plants need to be studied and incorporated into Rural Systems for this purpose. Both additions tend to increase NPP. The amount of biomass is " proportional to the influence that an ecosystem exerts over future events within it" (Melillo 1985:42). Melillo warned that if inputs (like nitrogen fertilizer) are excessive, i.e., not related to plant demands, the inputs will pass through the system, be wasted to that ecosystem, and probably be a pollutant to another one. The costs of analyses are high; the costs of additions are also high and have hidden secondary energy consumption costs. Maximum rates were given in Chapter 7.These are experiment-station yields; farmers generally get 10-25% less. We count not yield but (yield - origin) / costs.
To get maximum profit, we must secure not maximum net yield but a desired yield, an optimum yield for low costs and high income. We work for extra production, but only desired production (within stated bounds), typically that of a system with yield higher than would be expected when the whole process depends on nature only. We study the relations of extra yield or ((yield - origin) x value) and report the comparative costs and gains under optimum management, current recommendations, and that from current areas without management, or " average" or classical management.
All estimates are confounded by assumptions, moisture, length of the growing season, species differences, past land use, pest and diseases occurrence, and cultural systems. The precision of the value of the maximum will probably be improved with research, but for comparative and scoring purposes it will be stable and change (if needed) can be presented in a regular formal 5-year announcement.
I cannot communicate too precisely the importance of precise objectives for a stable, profitable system (Chapter 7). Any part of a system may fail but I am sure that systems will fail if the objectives are not precise and well described and under rigorous feedback action. The system of specific and practical importance is the estimated net present discounted value of the yield of commercial plants or plant parts, both a function of world markets, transportation systems, political systems … even the existence of nearby or managed enterprises (such as within Rural System (due to economies, market recognition, competition, innovations, and efficiencies). There are yet-to-be-quantified contributions of all of these to fauna or to the so-called " secondary production" of ecologists. The equation can be re-written and further developed with the yield of commercial plant parts" (e.g., pasture forage, Chapter 20) as the dependent variable, then substitutions made. Yield may be expanded to include all yields, many of which are not plant parts. That then becomes meaningful when combined with estimates for discounting as, grossly,
Profits = (Unit value x total units of yield (i.e., P*)) - costs
The costs are distributed through the system and are general, impacting many parts of the system (e.g., communications, transportation, marketing, and even unit production by cooperating workers). The analytical work progresses from continual analyses of the break-even point, maximum production, production line, and maximum net profit, then the appropriate bounds on the upper and lower limits for production that assures sustained or continued profits. One rule of the managerial system, a conservative one, is that the stable nutrients removed in achieving P* must be replaced. This amount is estimated from simple ash analyses. We know that in many forest areas, the nutrient pool is very large and not likely to be depleted in a few years. We work for the distant future. Cropping, livestock production, and logging are extractive. The effects of this land-mining of nutrients by tree and product removal are beginning to show. Call it " fairness" or just attention to production processes, but we know well that the costs of replenishing nutrients now will be less than in the future. We tend them well now, hold on to them (for the costs of replacement are high), and reluctantly build to levels needed for profitable crop and animal production.
Structures
A special, long-term use of land, the working platform, in addition to its use for production is that for structures. One advantage of the Rural System concept is that the perceived capital investment is small. We use and manage existing lands and their structures, prior human investments now in place. Rural areas have special character because of their structures not found elsewhere - the barns, silos, out-buildings, and wide variety of owner houses. In Appalachia, the houses are known for their evolving nature, initially small with new rooms and porches converted to rooms as the family grows.
One property of successful families and enterprises is that they have adequate capital, the structure, software, real " stuff," that the system can show as results in terms of investments in human resources, a channel network, building brand awareness, preference, and intention to adopt the product by consumer groups. The concept of total community structure as capital is a different "animal" that has significant managerial implications. Instead of evaluating product performance in terms of sales and profit, product managers are urged to think in terms of total system ability to do work or achieve objectives over many years, perhaps to the planning horizon. How much more capital did we accumulate in the last period? What kind?
Investment in a product market by competitor product organizations is a key determinant to developing the product market. A growing consumer interest in a product or service can be very beneficial to all producers. Rural System simply wants a share of that market. Competing too vigorously against competitor organizations may hide the fact that a certain amount of collective investment by all competitor organization is needed to insure the growth and eventual stability of the product market. Think of the structure of an ecosystem-trees, layers, streams-but in business physical facilities, equipment, staff, resources, etc. There are benefits from diversity, achieving a large scale, the benefits from widespread acceptance of what is normal or expected. Financial resources are used to add structure to the firm. Structure is cumulative like bricks in a building. There are contacts, reputations, brand awareness, and community position. There are subtle " chips" that managers gain in dealings and negotiations over time. Of course there are buildings and equipment, but there are also laws and regulations, the social capital, in which industries must invest by testimony, lobbying, and other means. Even more subtle is the role for competitors. In ecological communities, trees are said to be competitors. They may compete for light, moisture and nutrients. Foresters and orchardists go to great trouble to plant trees so they do not compete with each other but so that they will achieve full utilization of available resources and economies of scale. Foresters prefer some trees competing for (we prefer " simultaneously seeking" ) sunlight because it makes them grow tall and straight and each protects others from wind storms. In mature forests, trees together shade the boles or main stem. Without such shade, the logs would grow leaves and small branches, "feather out" foresters say, and the resulting holes and stain destroy the value of otherwise clear boards that may result from such trees. There seem clear parallels with singular or "lazy" corporations who may not have allies to fight adverse legislation or tariffs or other wars.
We developed a " group of Groups," within Rural System, a subsystem to deal with the many related needs for old and changing structures of the rural environment, especially those on Rural System Tracts.
Structures, like ecosystems must be managed. Trees die, limbs break, streams change their course across the land. Contacts move, partners retire, and colleagues join other firms. Buildings need paint, repairs, restoration. Moth and rust doth corrupt them. Litigation is a wasting disease. There is entropy. In ecological systems " business capital" it is the dead stuff on the forest floor, called detritus, as well as the living plants, all biomass. It is cumulative and time is required. All ecological systems build structure but it is not purposive, merely the result of a sequence of local events to-date. In the most productive systems in the world, the marsh grasslands, production is very high, respiration moderate, and much of the structure annually washed away by tides and spring floods. In large old forests, the redwoods for example, biomass per unit area is very great but production is slow, balanced with respiration. Without structure, the biomass builds over time, plants continue to invade and die. The cumulative action over many years creates an environment within which plants… and products… and people in communities can survive.
Entropy is not symptomatic of a dying product organization but of a growing one. Information can be used more efficiently by organizations supporting a product brand in the maturity stages of the life cycle than in the developmental stages. For a firm to bring itself to a maturity stage, it has to use marketing information systems and to reduce the waste of trial-and-error learning by using consultants.
Determined not to compete with existing progressive companies, we developed working relations with a small architectural firm. They recognized the potentials of diversification but could not afford to achieve them. Diversification has high costs as well as extra and potentially new risks for which the existing company members did not have expertise.
We made our contacts at the crest of interest in global warming. Somehow it became noted and named and the massive forgotten efforts of the energy crisis of the 1970's were given new birth. Presenting what we could offer seemed reasonable but in starting, we had little to offer but ideas and prospects for the future. We began by suggesting the likely positive benefits of our intent to cooperate, thus open communication and forming the preliminary nodes of a network. We shared contacts, web links, publications, and offered participation of experts in their list of experts and cooperators. The first real contribution to them was a space within our e-catalog as well as listing with us as a cooperator. Such listings imply affiliation with principles and practices and thus may have undesirable connotations to some potential customers. The firm had our orientation toward the land. We worked together a common potential client base, not a universal one. We offered free advertising, new customers, expansion of their reputation, more contacts, ideas, and several new " venues" for a small rural community architectural firm.
We could see the potentials of net growth in their business profits of at least 10% over a few years. Our objectives were to be achieved in their expanded employment, their expanded tax contribution to the community, property value enhancement, generally improved esthetics and energetics of the community from their clients, ease of access to services and information to other Rural System groups, and financial gains from specific contracts and services.
We expected conflicts and began discussing their potentials early in our "net-working." There are many differences in views of architects, landscape planners, and landscape ecologists. Their education differs as much as opinions about what are "beautiful places from their childhood memories." Their insistence upon " art" winning in some dialogical battle with " science" was usually resolved in the appearance of their structures or projects several years after construction. For some architects, " design" happens. For others, design is the listing of objectives and criteria (Chapter 7) and the selection of specific well-quantified elements from among thousands available that fit those lists very well, if not perfectly. After the preliminary design work, a little " extra" is added at low cost and low risk, signifying the artist having had his or her personal life-force payoff. The artist concerned with exterior wall color compatibility may not have the interest or education to deal with shrink and swell potentials of the foundation soil or suitable plants for each soil condition. The interests and abilities of people in this field are vastly different and very diverse.
We continued to discuss and to try to find ways to work together on a set of interests, largely to build our profits together for the longterm. We developed relations with The Realtor Group. It could provide the architect the fundamental dimensions of the building site. The Realtor Group typically provides an expert system analysis of lands that may meet the criteria and interests of a client, or a prospective buyer and then suggests (if requested) three financial plans for assisting in achieving a sale or purchase. The typical report produced is like a medical " work-up" on a patient. It can also be compared to military intelligence. It is a system that produces reports, maps, and illustrations that help realtors sell land by providing the answers to questions that clients actually have or may ask about land. It is the best information currently available within a dynamic database and it is provided in cost-effective phases. The same information is needed by the inclusive architect.
A computer " fly-over" (giving the observer in front of the computer monitor some of the feeling of flying slowly over a property or part of a county) was provided for large tracts. After a sale, we would offer to help market the productive potentials of the land for the purchaser, presenting the services (and financial rewards) it might provide. Among other staff, making connections and marketing for the realtors was encouraged. Certification of forests as being sustained and well managed was arranged. Boundary signs were sold; plans suggested; Trust-land tax benefits arranged; fencing and trails and restoration offered; etc.
The business model of the conventional realtor was being flipped by the Rural System's structures subsystem to one of providing entrance to long-term regional productivity, land and land value enhancement (related to later sales and the cumulative tax base), and the realtor being the middle-person for sophisticated, modern, high-quality long-term resource management. It connects responsible buyers with land units (each of which is unique). It attempts to increase the chances that customers will be pleased, the land and resources will be used well, the people of the area will prosper, and the users of the real estate or structures component of Rural System will become increasingly prosperous.
Work with the Viewscape Group seemed reasonable. That group had a regional viewscape or landscape beauty analysis software package for sale but its greatest applications were in analyzing views from potential construction points - the " picture window" or office panorama. Some customers desired possible before-and-after simulated views of change resulting from constructions (e.g., powerlines or proposed structures).
Landscaping has many different professional viewpoints, but a Rural System Tract can be seen as the "canvas" and the structures as well as vegetation and natural objects are the materials to be added to or removed from that canvas to achieve beauty for the client. To do that, more than technical expertise is needed. Gardens may be one such element in that artistic work and the Gardens Group could provide an important service to match size, shape, colors, seasonally with the design to match soil and water considerations simultaneously with the shadows cast (thus sites for suitable shrubs and flowers) by the existing or proposed structures.
The Land Force (Chaper 14) provided repairs, maintenance, and additions using Smartwood certified wood. The Certification Group worked with them. The Land Force specialized in retrofitting old rural homes (especially for energy conservation,) maintaining those vacated, and preserving desirable rural viewscapes. They provided the major work force for the Dogwood Inns of Rural System, bed-and-breakfast structures throughout the region serving the Writers Group and others. The Force employed specialized techniques in most structured for " preventing harmful falls," especially for the elderly.
In one region the architects allowed The Villages Group to become very effective. The Villages Group lived with the paradox that if most of the Rural System concept is rejected or fails, a planned residential-units enterprise will not be meaningful or appropriate. The counter is that housing in rural redevelopment is badly needed. There are needs for movement out of the floodplains, increased utilities (including water and sewage systems), and increased energy conservation. The needs do exist whether Rural System develops or not. The sad accompaniment is that if Rural System does not develop, the housing will not be needed due to the mass migration and ghost-county conditions that seem likely to exist in the coming decade. As have developed elsewhere, new communities have formed as members study and work from their computers. Several staff wrote a book on the built environment for living after widespread social disaster in the US.
The soundscape group worked intensively with the viewscape and health group where noise as a health stressor was confronted. It did local analyses for wildlife law enforcement and the Safety and Security Group to pinpoint the sites of gunshot noise.
The architectural staff worked with the Fence Group Work to develop a low cost beautiful rural fence with golden-section dimensions made from small wood from thinned certified forests, and with durability enhanced by a new organic solution from the Products Group. They developed an energy-conserving paint (and roof covering) color and components optimized to achieve albedo (sunlight reflection) appropriate for the latitude of a building and topographic shadow received by the building sides. They worked on specialized yard landscaping for wildlife and nature, for building energy conservation (wind and solar shadows), and for vertebrate animal damage prevention (a service of the Pest Force). Pests are ever-present and work with the Pest Force was essential in all aspects of the dynamic productive farm for preventing net financial loss was as important as increasing yields. A vegetable garden for each home owner was explored, and the pooled results from neighborhoods lead to a human nutrition/health unit nested within the local school system (Chapter 11).
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