Self-Reinforcing Feedback Loops

I am obsessed with the thought of self-reinforcing feedback loops. The most basic of these is the one you probably joked about as a kid-- what came first the chicken or the egg?

I am also obsessed with weird, random news. I came across a headline that reads "Man spots his wife during visit to brothel." Basically, she had a job to bring in some more spending money, and he visited the brothel one day to discover that was the job she was referring to. They then got divorced. Here's what I imagine their feedback loop looked like.

Hubby goes to work everyday, makes lots of money. For whatever reason (to reward himself, or no satisfaction at home) he decides to visit the brothel and spend some money. So he brings less home. Wifey doesn't have enough money, so she searches for a side job. Happens the brothel is hiring, so she goes to work all day... a job that probably makes her too tired to give her husband much attention. So then he must go to work and make more money which he will now spend at the brothel.

The feedback loop continues. I imagine their divorce case looked a little like the chicken and the egg scenario.

What does this have to do with anything?

I'd like to mention a self-reinforcing feedback loop that we are all a part of. With the ability to extract of fossil fuels, we now have more energy available to create tools and extract more resources. This allows us to produce more food, more efficiently! This in return allows us to support a larger population, and the population has been increasing. The worlds population is just over 6.6 billion now! Population growth inevitably leads to higher energy demand, and the cycle continues with more extraction.

I'm not going to play doomsday or try to predict when the earth will be too populated to sustain itself (there are plenty of experts doing this already). We should keep in mind that the earth itself is a limited space and that a lot of the resources that have allowed our population to increase are non-renewable. This is why it is important to seek alternative solutions now.

Social Permaculture Adventure

My move to the ranch set the pace for my adventure ahead. Emory had a wedding to attend in Houston, so we parted ways and I drove a truck and a trailer out here solo.

I didn't realize I had missed a turn until I was lost. I powered up my laptop and found another route (could have just used a map).

My alternate route is nice at first, but quickly becomes windy and thins down to just one narrow lane, not great conditions for the trailer I'm pulling. I come to a fork in the road and its either left or right. Neither road is mentioned on my map, and there no sign of the road I was to remain on for many more miles to go.

I choose left and soon after I see a small house and decide to stop for help. I meet very enthusiastic Pablo and Claudine of secluded Sunny Lane, TX. You wouldn’t know it because it doesn’t actually say that anywhere, but nonetheless, there it exists, population: 2.

After exchanging life stories and chatting about the weather and the land and if I had a boyfriend or any children and why not dear, they lead me out to safer roads.

Thats how I learned the first lesson I needed to know for my adventure ahead: people are your best resource for information regarding the area around you. Neither a computer nor a map can tell you the conditions of the road ahead. The best information you can get about an area is by connecting with the people who live in it.

This reminds me of the first principal of Permaculture: Relative Location.

Roadrunners

This is a funny creature. Two zipped across the road yesterday as we were driving along.

When they catch food and they aren't immediately hungry, they hang it up for safe keeping on barbed wires on the fence. If you look carefully near a roadrunner habitat, you might find a collection of grasshoppers, worms, even small snakes stored for a snack later.

The website

We've pondered the website for a couple weeks now, getting excited about ideas then realizing the work involved. We've tracked potential outcomes, target markets, different ideas for marketing and networking. I think we have finally reached a good place.

The website will focus solely on our project...the development of a self-sustainable living system on the ranch that can accommodate a small but decent sized group of people, we're thinking about 10 houses. We will lay out maps of what we plan to do with the development and develop building codes to work with an energy grid based on renewable energy. Plots for building, irrigation, shared community features, etc. We will also blog about our experience along the way: questions raised, steps taken, lessons learned, resources used.

Hopefully people will want to talk about it with us! We are new to this, so we will certainly need feedback on our ideas from other people who have gone before us. We also hope our experience will help others as they also make the necessary changes in the future by applying our lessons learned to their specific location. We'll have open comments and forums.

Oh, and "sponsor a tree" will be a feature!

Cradle to Cradle

I just finished reading this book...if I were a product designer I'd now have a much broader perspective when I consider the entire life-cycle of a product.

The authors urge that "Reduce, Reuse, Recycle" actually perpetuates a one-way "cradle-to-grave" manufacturing model, dating back to the industrial revolution. Recycling also downcycles our materials, making them less useful over time.

Why not consider a broader life cycle for the products we create (even considering the grave the materials will go to). A tree produces thousands of blossoms in order to create another tree, yet we consider its abundance not wasteful, but safe, beautiful, and highly effective.

Waste equals food. If we look at waste that way, we can create "food" out of it in two ways: Biological nutrients or technical nutrients. We can develop all our products with this in mind. We keep the two types of waste separate for easy processing. "Biological nutrients" are those that can easily reenter the water or soil without depositing toxins and synthetic materials, and "technical nutrients" can be continuously circulated as pure and valuable materials within close-loop industrial cycles.

The end result is that our products/waste are reborn into something else useful and beneficial...cradle to cradle, instead of cradle to grave.