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Rural System? Just Dreaming …
A For-Profit Conglomerate for
Meaningful Jobs
Healthful Communities
and Improved Natural Resource Management
by Robert H. Giles, Jr., Ph.D.
Professor Emeritus
Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, Virginia
2007
Chapter 31. The Counterintuitive
Dreaming: The joy of full young muscles at the start of a run
Fast up the slope, no time to waste, no trudging …up to …?
Settling in … go half way to the limit … so that you can get back.
The wind? The upright force? Restraint from the surround.
Slower, then slower…surging, pressing muscles made to move …
just won't.
Plodding, padding along, not performance, just perseverance. Just Dreaming…
| Stories about the efforts of an imagined Rural System leader. Rural System has not been created and I continue to try to understand why not and to overcome those reasons. |
Hugo had started a region-wide program to encourage bee keeping. He had worked a little with The Butterfly Group staff but was pushing for mass marketing of hives, bee keeping among youth and the elderly, and collective "collecting" of honey for reasonable sale prices to the large-volume buyers. His staff had given away starter hives, conducted training, and held regular meetings for those interested in all aspects of bee keeping. It was a fascinating hobby and household "crop" for several people in the region but he had expanded both the number of hives and the regional coverage of hive locations shown as pins on his office map. Rural System kept a small portion of the collective profits from hives now scattered over 75% of the region.
He told only a few people that he wanted to get a clearly significantly profitable bee and honey activity going throughout the region so that if inappropriate mass insecticide spraying was ever proposed for the region, there would be a large group of people with financial standing to effectively oppose and stop such practice. Such an application would kill the bees, thus the enterprise. There would be no appeals to spurious research claims, the morality of killing any animals, or the technicalities of lethal doses. Even a protest claim that "it will kill my bees" from the seventh grader will not have the same impact as a legal injunction against destroying a business.
Hugo had worked with an agricultural group on a project to control an insect that was damaging cotton. He often told of suggesting a cost analysis before the project continued. He figured that if the control project was effective, the cotton production would increase significantly and under the simple laws of supply and demand, the price would decrease and the farmers in the region would not make any profit and then they would have to shift to another crop … a worse result than if the insect had persisted in its damaging ways. His suggestion was denied and a return-suggestion made that (approximately) was "shut up."
Hugo had first read of the counterintuitive from Forrester(1969) in Urban Dynamics. He had experienced it several times but had never labeled it. The word not only gave meaning to those past events but it provided a storage place for new examples. Strangely, it stimulated his new work to design similar events. His past experiences had been with computer models. A computer simulation of an ecological system might have been to produce a population of a species of a specific amount in 20 years. Surprise! It did not; the number was much too small, not just a little off the expected number. Studying the model, the reason was found in that two factors should have been working together and they had been kept separate. The results were unexpected. Counterintuitive is not just a word for the unexpected but has the extra dimension of the reverse of the intended outcome occurring. A counterintuitive strategy uses knowledge of such likely reversals.
Protecting doe deer seemed to be a good idea at first but resulted in over populations and damaged forest areas. A person bent on destroying forests (for whatever reason) might not approach that end directly but do so by trying to retain "buck-only" hunting rules. It would probably achieve the same result.
Hugo wasn't sure of the final number of simple rules that governed how a generally agreed perceived condition was reached within a named ecosystem e.g., an adult white oak (Quercus alba) stand. There were simple rules that govern fish schooling action and the patterned flight of large flocks of birds. "Things in nature follow simple rules" is a simple rule. He suspected that there were no more than 50 such rules such as developed by people studying artificial intelligence. Starting with an hypothetical bare soil plot, he put in sequence rules with range limits such as "If vital seed is present (from any source)" and "If surface soil moisture is available (from any source)" and "If temperature is between X and Y (alpha -unit-specific growing season) and …with the addition of several "loss" rules … the result would be "Then adult plant S is present." The aggregate of the plants (called by some an ecosystem, a plant community, or an ecological type) could then be explained, predicted, and some factor or factors increased or reduced to achieve the desired plants. An ecosystem is not more complex than can be imagined, just more tiring. A computer can help relieve that.
Introducing silk-making larvae of the gypsy moth to the US seemed like a good idea but they escaped and now destroy hardwood forests. That was just a mistake. The effect of the release before it occurred could not then have been imagined. Effects of unwanted releases can now be imagined and the literature of "invasive species" suggests that people who allow such releases should be treated as arsonists or people who do not guard well their campfires.
If intuition rules, as in so many environmental and rural settings, then perhaps counter-intuitive techniques can be used for the common good… at least to achieve the common good before education can be effective enough to elicit the desired behaviors. The system has to be known very well, modeled, and then a plan created that may on the surface seem wrong (to the group intuition) but that will produce the desired result.
Hugo realized how important the beauty of the landscape was to the local economy. People traveled great distances to see the autumn leaf colors, the contrasting conifer greens, the diverse Appalachian built-on farm structures, flowering meadows, and the pastures with sheep and cattle. If gasoline for automobiles and sight-seeing became very high, these people's positive impact on the economy would lessen. He knew that they did not know what they were seeing was a special breed of "beautiful." It was the results of enormous human work over time - stumps removed, land cultivated and leveled, crops treated and harvested, cows and sheep tended, wildfires fought. He had proposed ranging (Chapter 18), both the word and the extensive activity as an alternative to "outdoor recreation" and "ecotourism." It was an enterprise but with a little thought it could be seen that for ranging to be very successful, all of the groups of Rural System could (and should) be involved. It was almost essential to stabilize the financial success of agricultural groups so that their products and structures would remain on the land … at least as scenery. The intrinsic beauty of farm land can no longer be assured without intensive land management. Extended loss of crop value changes the countryside. The scenery changes. It also changes after livestock and lumber market crashes. Rural System cannot prevent such macro-scale events but it can damp the scenic effects, retain certain activities that control elements of landscape beauty, retain the people who love to live and work in such places, and actively manage significant viewsheds. The real value of doing so, the payoffs, can be seen in the local financial indices, in Q* and in the income of the Ranging Group.
Hugo had read several books and papers of Howard T. Odum who described "embodied energy" as the total cost in energy units required to produce an object and begin its use. Calories or BTUs of energy needed each day to fire the furnaces and run the machinery to produce 10,000 unit of some auto part per day make for a easy division to get and estimate the embodied energy in each part. Adding the cost of delivery to an assemble line required other estimates.
Hugo now saw, before the time when almost everyone saw things in the same way, the energy needed to produce everything … and the energy always being lost. The laws of physics dictate how it will be lost. It may be temporarily stored, but it is always on the way out… to cosmic otherness. The slower it is lost, the better, because it is going up in cost at fanstastic rates because the main sources, the fossil fuels, are becoming more difficult to get. They are more limited than generally realized. The costs of getting, storing. and moving electric energy are similarly high and getting higher. Hugo believed that "things of beauty" are intrinsically things with high embodied energy. A beautiful ancient turned water vase was well designed, functional …did essential work. Even some oil paintings were of beauty for they contained messages, truths, and stimulated healthful feelings… they worked. He saw the beauty in antique furniture as lasting objects, with high energy costs to create them, and them being the only ones that had survived among the hundreds of similar one that had not survived or that had not worked as well. For the future, while energy costs were inappropriately low, he began collecting objects and creating new ones high in embodied energy. In the low fossil energy future, he and his enterprise colleagues would be rich with objects that did lasting work. These included reusable aluminum beams and frames and their connectors for housing and other structures, stainless steel tools, anvils, pry-bars, sewing needles and scissors, aluminum cooking vessels, Dutch ovens, bits and bridle rings, fundamental surgical and wood-working tools, plow points and garden hoes, iron alloy stoves, food drying racks, tempered glass ware, frames for solar drying of food, and carborundum sharpeners.
Umpleby (1970) suggested computer simulations for urban and environmental decision making for the public. In essence he suggested when the public must evaluate and "give inputs" to the public agencies for a proposed "environmental project," the computer simulation should be extensively used. The consequences of the development could be approximated and if the voter or participant thought it was desirable, he or she or a group would vote one way. If bad, they would vote another. Of course whether good or bad will be a combined function of the observers' value systems as described in Chapter 4 and the physical consequences of the proposed project estimated by the computer. Most large projects requiring or allowing citizen commentary are complex, and few people can see all of the major consequences of any one of them. The computer simulation lists and approximates all of the major ones, and thus each citizen involved with the machine is taught all of the consequences and given the suggestion that they make the tradeoffs required of the project decision makers. The dangers to project proponents are evident. To the politician or leader, the accuser screams: "From the simulator we knew it would be awful, and you went ahead anyway, and now it has happened!" Acceptance or rejection is not the only alternatives. Adjustments and revisions can be good specific "inputs." Hugo had two people working part-time on a system to combine value estimates with the ecological and physical simulation, giving a group score for the value-based consequences of each run of the computer simulation.
Hugo told of once having seen a rudimentary use of the counterintuitive. A consultant was locating a waste disposal site for a county. A site had been carefully selected but word of it had leaked and citizens were in a letter-writing and meeting frenzy. At a meeting, the consultant suggested that the citizens vote on factors displayed on maps that he displayed. They progressively rejected (with a show of hands after each map was shown) areas over groundwater recharge, then areas next to schools, then areas next to historic sites and a planned museum, then areas adjacent to lakes and large streams, then government-owned park and forest land, then prime farm land, then floodplains. There was only one very small area left on the final map where these maps did not overlap. It was the identical one being proposed for the waste disposal site. The place was counter to their intuition. The citizens left the meeting convinced of the proper location but generally still appropriately not pleased because waste disposal in not solved easily or without major costs.
He had commented that he could only imagine how many projects had been withdrawn or not proposed publicly because of the threat of the public approval process. Scrapping ideas was one of the impacts of the federal and state environmental impact requirements. He had seen it in work on a proposed small powerline to be put across a large tract. Facing one woodland owner for approval for gaining a powerline corridor may have seemed easy for the electric company. The emergence of a citizen-held geographic information system and dynamic programming to map a minimum cost powerline corridor was a significant enough threat to have the proposal withdrawn. Courtroom battles between a powerline proponent and a group opposed to such a line can become very newsworthy, costly, and damage public image. If such systems with baseline data are available for rural land owners, they may provide the threat, muscle, or backup to prevent or slow the easy "taking" of rural structures and special areas for any project that people wish to propose, just because it cannot be afforded on urban land. Agricultural "zoning" near cities is now a joke, a holding action and mere speculative banking of land for the next residential development, factory, airport, dam, race track or urban idea with too-high price.
Progress was being made on a computer game. It was intended to be instructional, but first users had become enthralled and had formed a club that met at lunch hour to play it. All the players had to do to win the game was to stabilize the shrimp population in a coastal estuary (easier said than done). It was a computer simulation with entries for the variables made at the computer monitor. Players could change the precipitation slightly, the acres in forests and cropland, the deer harvest, the cropland practices, the flow rate over a central dam. About 30 entries would be made and up would pop a score for the population stability. At lunch, players debated the numbers and choices to be made and entered at each option of the game. The first version of the game produced more frustration for players than the developer could stand. No matter what the players did, the area under management was such that the shrimp could not be stabilized. The major river dam in the game held back all silt, thus the coastal flats decreased and Spartina grass area was not stable, and these larval areas were essential for the shrimp. The players were meso-scale managers of watersheds and had complete control…but not over the past decision to build the dam. The important message had been discovered by the player-students. Subsequent game versions allowed more changes and the complexity of those with their interactions attracted the lunch crowd and then challenges between players within different Groups of Rural System appeared. The games soon matured and became added to the list of the Products Group and displayed on the e-catalog.
He had encouraged the raising of catfish in wire cages in ponds, not just for family food and for local sales, but as a hidden motive to address the mix of substances applied to the land that was running into farm ponds. Just like the size of the shrimp population in the coastal estuary was the measure of how well students played the Waterloo game described previously (Chapter 7) , the catfish in the cage was the evident agro-monitor, the family's living answer to: "You will eat that?" Supplementing his catfish, he had placed ecorods (one of the products sold by Rural System's products group) in ponds along with "artificial mussels" (Env. Pollution 2007 145:104-110), a device to monitor heavy metals in water. Results were reported from a local lab and then computer mapped. Monitoring was just one step of Rural System's feedback function in its systems approach. The monitored results signaled the farmer to form committees, get legislation drafted … or make the simple visit to get the discarded battery out of a gully feeding the pond's inflow after storms.
He had a special fascination for dairy goats and special disdain for their reputation as trash-eaters. He had seen too many abused goats and had studied their nutritional needs and multiple potentials. Convinced of the potentials of vertical pastures, grass "felts" grown hydroponically, that he had learned about in the '70s, he worked on a small-scale, two-layer plastic greenhouse "pasture" for his few Toggenburg goats. He was working for the day for operating a hydroponic pasture in an abandoned tall building within the city border. Lighting would be from windows and mirrows, and energy of solar panels on the building top, water would be scrubbed of pollutants, and the grass mats or "felts" would be fed to goats on Rural System Tracts as part of their diet. He saw the benefits in clean cheeses and other milk and meat products but also in employment, reduced transportation energy costs, and relaxed pressure on agricultural land for crops not readily grown in vertical farms (Despommier et al. 2007).
Hugo smiled as he confessed that he had often gone to meetings and before others arrived had folded 3 x 5 inch cards, written member's names on them, and placed then strategically around the table. People respond automatically to such things and students of group psychology can position dominant and submissive people and increase the probabilities of desired discussion and votes on items on the agenda. His card was always at the right hand of the chairperson, giving a slight edge to power and influence over time.
Someone commented that since they had known him, Hugo always seemed to be the secretary of local groups (because he always volunteered for that generally-unwelcomed job). He knew that committees were a way to escape decision making and the risks of them. Few people ever came to meetings prepared. Motions were made in haste, poorly conceived and poorly remembered. As secretary, he could easily write and rephrase motions advantageous to achieving Rural System objectives. Secretarial delays and questions "for clarification" were more powerful and finally constructive than the tedious applications of Robert's Rules of Order to sentences.
"Ethical?" someone asked, and Hugo asked if voting on accepting the minutes of the last meeting (and their land impacts) without reading them was more ethical.
Hugo had learned of H.J. Heikkenen's work on southern pine trees, thought it had implications for other tree species, and brought it to the Forest Group for application on Rural System Tracts. The counterintuitive element could be a key to significant financial gains, reduced costs, and reduced losses … the elements of profit from wood.
Heikkenen had raised the example of Christmas trees. Still green after weeks, such trees have been severed from their roots. They are dead, but have the appearance of being alive. Pine trees in large forest stands may appear to be alive but some may be dead. The land owner sees the yellow or yellowing trees, examines them, and finds on them bark beetles. They want someone to do something about the beetles that seem to be killing their trees.
It happens that the trees had already been severely stressed or killed by soil moisture stress (too much or too little moisture) and the beetles had flown in, like buzzards to a dead deer carcass, to feed on the tree. They come in while the tree is still green and have a few weeks to start consuming bark and wood before anyone notices the yellow needle colors. (Heikkenen had proven this with full-grown pine trees. He cabled them into place, sawed through them at the base, and placed a metal plate in the cut. He knew exactly when the tree was dead, very stressed by him!)
Rather than spray insecticides with all of their direct costs and potential indirect costs to the environment and human health, and no effect on the volume of wood harvested, a solution is to harvest the trees as rapidly as possible and to institute a progressive program among the remaining trees, then replant at proper spacing the same or alternative species in the harvested areas. This replanting does not set up a repeating situation but puts genetically superior trees in the proper places (selected from computer maps of such species-specific places including soil, sunlight, slope, and aspect (direction facing downhill), nearness to well-designed and managed roads for a mid-term thinning, monitoring, final removal and replanting, fire protection, hunting, nature study and recreational use (e.g., Nature Folks). These trees, when planted properly and inoculated, can be seen as stem clusters that grow rapidly with available moisture and need to be harvested for profit at a carefully-monitored stage of maximum growth balanced with their water loss and the changing price of wood. The rough old pine is a sensitive water budgeter and has few alternative strategies at its command when stresses occur. The managers of the Forest Group are sensitive to these needs. It will take years to suppress the slogans of "plant pines" … action better than doing nothing to fallow land… but not much better. What is needed is a program of careful site selection, unlike anything that could be done cost effectively before, then intensive management to meet soil conditions expected over 50-60 years including the human-caused effects of Earth-warming. Harvests are to be made for maximum profits for volumes harvested at about age 50 (site determined) in a harvest rotation. The key point: never let the rapidly-growing and profit-producing pine cluster become moisture stressed. (The beetle attack is an expression of mis-management.)
In one city, buildings were once torn down and rebuilt elsewhere for urban renewal and social gains. The opposite of desired social results were observed because of the great travel time to work places and the resultant loss of family supervision of children, increased crime, and family breakup that occurred. The results were counterintuitive. The concept can be used if thoughtful people, often with computer assistance, can imagine the third and fourth-order consequences of actions, and then prepare for them or even use them as they seek new advantageous positions with the lesser-intuited outcomes.
Counterintuitives are not "un-intuited" or unimagined outcomes like the costs of wastes after development or the pollution of water below land fills, the so- called externalities. Counterintuitive results may appear and we find that these may be the results of the data and how they are analyzed. For example, abundant manure does not depress crop yields of farmers (as it might appear from the field data) but farmers with abundant manure are interested in livestock production and those with little manure concentrate on high crop production (Vanclay et al. 2006:103).
Hugo frequently discussed "feedback" and claimed it was desperately needed throughout Rural System. It was not "communication replies" as some texts suggest, but monitoring of a system and taking corrective action based on objectives. Objectives were the core ingredient because without them, feedback had no basis or standard for comparison. In addition to feedback, he often discussed standback. He claimed it was stepping out of the system, physically if needed, and standing far enough away so that you see as much of it as possible and the surrounding systems. (He often reminded groups to which he talked that no unaided individual can ever see even one-half of a ball.) Competitors always lurked on the periphery. Then he suggested taking several viewpoints, some close and some distant. Taking the "god-stance" was always difficult as part of standback. He wanted to know what would be asked about a project of situation if sure truth would be supplied … and what would be done with that knowledge to impact the next 5 years. Somewhat like scenario building, the work of standback was difficult and the results were invariably counterintuitive. It typically sharpened objectives and altered the feedback activities.
Rural System may provide employment and income for farmers and may prevent the early sale of their land but it may have the counterintuitive effect of retaining the beauty of the rural countryside. Hugo imagined promoting rabbit raising among youth but really working counterintuitively for market loyalty for Rural System, future employees, a source of nitrogen waste additions for local gardens, and a potential use for the invasive vine, kudzu, for feed.
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How shall we bring the results within this new regional Rural System to the people for acceptance and then adoption and use? We have formulated an adoption model that is based on intensive study, thought, extension-related and education experiences over 40 years. The model has all the components of the general system theory and it is a particular type of decision system with physical, observable action as one part (viewed by some as the "final" part) of a dynamic system. Beyond taking action to design and gain acceptance (meaning a general feeling of satisfaction, agreement, and openness), we have to find a way to implement some high level of continual resource management for people.
As discovered elsewhere in this book, good systems work depends on selecting good objectives. I want someone to adopt a large solution to a larger problem than usually imagined or recognized. It required high initial investments (as in a barn … for many glasses of milk). I knew that Rural System itself was somewhat counterintuitive. I remembered the punch line of a forgotten joke told by an Extensions Service agent: "I ain't farmin' half as good as I know how!" I remembered the special day I had walked over my small acreage. I was was in a funk, hands deep in my Carharts. Looking at the trees, field, and stream I asked himself, "Why aren't I managing my acres at least half as well as I know how?" I knew right much about the land and what was usually called "good management," but I didn't know the answer.
I have struggled with that question of why other landowners and I may not be adopting and using desirable, beneficial rural land practices - for those ranging from within forestry to crop production or livestock care. Maybe it's just the evidence!? They are adopting and I cannot see or measure the change! Maybe the practices are adopted but there has not yet been a chance to implement them. I was making too simplistic speculations. Any one reason could prevent adoption. The more time that I spent, the more clear the other reasons (or call them "excuses" if you must) for not adopting a concept or practice became. These were:
When laid out in sequence, the reasons presented, when generalized, suggest the wonder that anything is adopted… and greater wonder that it is implemented. Dozens of people have studied how to get something adopted. They have studied the action, or lack of it. They know that self esteem is vital. People will not reach out to others (intrinsic within Rural System) if they do not feel good about themselves, willing to take risk, even a small one. Not quite as important, they must feel like they are part of a community and "belong" (and that declines as friends move toward the cities) and can do things (win at group projects like building a barn). Nowak et al. (1984), however, found that personal and socioeconomic characteritics of farm operators were relatively unimportant in explaining the adoption of agricultural "best management practices." The characteritics of the farm operation (the firm) and land and ecological factors were dominant. The most important factor was strong, consistent institutional support (i.e., financial incentives, credit, education, and planning aids). We concentrate on the Rural System concept, hypothesizing that if adopted and implemented, self esteem will grow and a new form of "institutional support" will emerge within the landowners and Rural System relations.
Rural System is grounded in the evidence that current activities in distressed US counties or developing countries do not appear to be working over large areas or affecting many of humans. Land degradation continues, agricultural production has stabilized and is threatened by new temperatures and moisture deficits, and populations with their needs are increasing. The costs that they bear are very great. In total, it appears irrational to continue along a failure pathway. The evidence is clear about the old path. It is not satisfactory. We do not want to sustain that pathway, processes, or its results.
The Rural System concept is unproven, but worth trying. Perhaps it too is infeasible, an irrational pursuit. It would seem reasonable to use the described system to see if it works or to assess an equally powerful one to achieve the much-desired human condition. Jests are frequently made about those who would "save the world." The system has a more limited objective, but one that is very large and believably impossible to achieve. It can be achieved and needs to be tried in a few situations, with feedback.
The major reason to be skeptical about its feasibility is that it depends upon many people accepting the concept and acting upon it. Perhaps there exists nothing more than a challenge of marketing. Competition and other grounds for failure have been discussed (Chapter 3). The odds are not impressively high. They are significantly less if we continue to use the current paradigm.
Leadership is required, and it may not be available. Nevertheless, people have taken risks in the past and I believe that success only comes from such risk taking. There is hidden risk in waiting, praying, and hoping.
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| A score for a system's performance may fluctuate over time but with a decided desired level and managerial competence, the system can be brought under control. |
I am not yet willing to commit to percentages of acceptance, or implementation, success, or (probably better) increase in aggregate Q* scores. I think this is an important topic for discussion. Unless people resolved the topic, they will always be frustrated by yet-undefined "failure" or elated by shallow success.
I grapple with the above list of the roots of resistance to getting Rural System started. How will we bring results of this regional Rural System to the people there? We know that there are few people or groups financially capable of adopting Rural System and implementing it. Many may find it favorable and desirable but far beyond their financial abilities. Initial investments are of the scope of starting a dairy, not improving a stall. Front-end costs are high just as for developing profitable software with the costs per unit of output beginning to decline after the first use (and profits increasing).
It is hopeful that others will see its importance and even though there are early financial difficulties (expected with most starting businesses) they will join in, support and encourage its growth and development, and participate in many activities. We need one adoption (or a few), then one for each of the groups. Before that or along with the needed adoption is the act of financial backing. A line of credit is sought so that we can proceed as rapidly as we can find dedicated managers and begin with their work. The groups will form when financial opportunity is offered and the capabilities of the group called Q Works can be offered. Q Works offers to the new manager of each group the ability to step off efficiently for success in each of their areas of expertise. Then the concepts and techniques of marketing take over (Chapter 17) along with the effectiveness of the Land Force and the expertise within each Group.
In Chapter 15, (Processes) I said, "Benefiting financially seems likely to allow financially-hard-pressed owners to retain rural lands, thus continuing to produce these otherwise-free benefits." Maybe a profitable Rural System is just counterintuitively socially selfish. So?!
I've heard "It won't work," too many times. Let's try it. Then I'll show you things that are really counterintuitive.
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