Economics and The Environment Part 2: Legibility

Part 1

In the late 1700s, the Germanic states of Prussia and Saxony began the development of "scientific forestry." Rather than the mess of random trees growing all over, the authorities decided to clearcut the forests and replace them entirely with Norway spruce in neat, parallel rows. Underbrush was cleared, and the new "scientifically managed" forests were much easier to harvest trees from- relatively inexperienced crews could easily log them with minimal training. It turned out in relatively short time, however, that the project was a complete and utter failure.

A quaking aspen tree farm in Idaho. The fallen tree was felled by a beaver. [Image source]

While the initial profits from the massive new tree farms were immense, they rapidly (for trees, at least) began to drop off. By the second generation of trees, growth was significantly reduced, with all the trees growing stunted and undernourished. The planners had, without realizing it, interfered with the complex ecological systems that maintained the soil in the forests, disrupting them to the point where the land could no longer maintain that much life. Plant diseases that affected the spruces had ample opportunity to deal far more damage than normal. The new forests were actually much more vulnerable to fires. Local animal and plant ecosystems were utterly disrupted, resulting in environmental damage lasting to this very day. On top of that, the new forest system began to completely disrupt the lives of local villagers- they no longer had acorns to feed their pigs, fallen branches to gather for their fires, or medicinal herbs to treat their illnesses.

Despite all of this, the administrators responsible for the forests were all promoted and hired elsewhere, as were their students. Forestry techniques like this spread all over the world, with similarly bad consequences wherever they went. This sort of treatment of nature was by no means limited to just forestry, either- similarly rigid, rectangular thinking was applied in all sorts of natural domains, from grazing rights to fishery management.

Wood is a crop. Forestry is Tree Farming." — Gifford Pinchot, First chief of the USDA Forest Service. [Image source]

This sort of behavior towards nature is a smaller aspect of the drive to increase the legibility of the world by governments. Legibility, in this context, is making the world countable, making it easy to write down for purposes of taxation and control. There really is no more essential tool to governance than knowledge of what you're governing- even military might needs to take second fiddle to having accurate censuses, accounting of resources, maps, etc.

So, if you can make the world legible, you can transform all sorts of issues from complex, messy, and difficult ones into simple engineering problems. The main problem with that? The world's not simple, neat, and orderly, and frantically resists efforts to be made such. A better way to put it is that the apparent chaos of nature conceals deeper, underlying order based off of actual existing conditions, while the simple, outwardly orderly plans to make the world more legible ignore the underlying conditions of complex systems, and so in practice end up being quite chaotic and unstable systems. For centuries now, thinkers have continually mistaken rectangularity for rationality, and both nature and society have suffered for it.

Brasilia, the capitol of Brazil, is an example of legibility run amok. Brasilia was designed wholesale by members of the High Modernist school of architecture, design, and urban planning, whose philosophy is possibly the most literal embodiment of legibility and mistaking rectangularity for rationality. Brasilia, for all its orderliness, is a miserable place to live. There is no street life, no crowds, is perpetually underpopulated, and the city feels antiseptic and barren. The more organic suburbs of the city, on the other hand, are thriving and alive. [Image source]

One key way in which heavy damage has been dealt is in agriculture, even outside of tree-farming. In order to make legible what each field contains, encouragement at all levels has promoted monocropping over multicropping- that is, planting a single crop in a field rather than multiple crops. While monocropping does produce higher yields in the short term than multicropping, that's it's only practical advantage in most ecosystems. (Rice paddies are an exception, but a weird one- rice paddies are actually their own thriving ecosystem. It's complicated.) Monocropping means that there will be nothing in the field much of the year outside of the main crop's growing season, resulting in much greater erosion of topsoil. With only a single plant growing in it, the complex ecological system that is soil gets rapidly and dangerously disrupted, rapidly losing nutrients and water absorption capabilities. Food security is reduced by the heightened risk of the solitary crop being hit by a disease, whereas in a multicropped field all the other crops would be fine.

There are tons of other advantages to multicropping as well, so why do granaries, corporations, local, and national governments all tend to endorse policies and prices that encourage monocropping? Two reasons. The first is (as I note in nearly every ecological article I write) our civilization's inability to worry about issues in the long term. The second, and possibly even more powerful, is the drive to make things more legible. Monocropped fields are far, far easier to tax, plant, and account for. Granaries only having to deal with one type of crop makes their jobs much easier.

The Iroquis tribe, along with countless other tribes in the Americas ranging from New England down into Central America, practiced multicropping in the form of the Three Sisters- maize (corn), beans, and squash. The maize provides a scaffolding for the bean vines to climb, instead of having to plant poles. The beans fix nitrogen in the soil that the other two plants use. The squash acts as ground cover, preventing weeds from establishing themselves and holding moisture in the soil. Together, they provided the majority of the nutrients necessary in many Native American diets. [Image source]

Various attempts to make the world more legible by changing the world almost universally fail. Even considerably more intelligent attempts than the ultimately ridiculous tree farms fail far more often that not. Western scientists frequently attempt to breed or engineer crops for regions around the world that seem perfect on paper, but fail miserably in practice, despite some of their impressive successes in more temperate regions similar to Europe. This is usually because they're trying to breed a more legible crop- that is, a crop that simply has a higher yield, rather than a crop that matches the extremely long and varied list of criteria that actual crops have around the world. The failure of European crop management in Bali's extensive rice paddies is an excellent example. Crops can't just be adapted to average rainfall and temperature- they have to be adapted to a host of other local ecological conditions, as well as to the actual agricultural, engineering, and cultural practices of the communities growing them.

This isn't to say that we should consider the drive to make the world legible evil or even an unworthy effort- running a civilization above the size of a village without a certain level of legibility is essentially impossible. The catch is that in the process of making the world legible, it is our surveying and census techniques that must become more advanced and capable of handling complex systems, rather than attempting to force our complex systems into being simple ones. More often than not, that effort to make the world more simple rather than trying to make our understanding more complex is what deals the damage to nature and civilization alike.

Medieval fields are bizarre and chaotic by modern standards, but were, for the most part, far more sustainable. The long parallel rows were not only easier to plow with medieval technology, but were actually easier to modify according to local conditions. The fields were actually divided between families on the basis of yield, not on the basis of space, ensuring everyone was capable of growing enough to feed their families, barring drought and crop failure. The open crop field system (as it's called today) lasted for well over a millennium, with field having far longer viable lifespans than modern fields. These fields were, however, certainly more inefficient than modern fields, with significantly lower yields. Drawing lessons from these, and other preindustrial agricultural systems, however, can allow us to have sustainable fields that still have high yields. We can totally have our cake and eat it too- we just need to stop assuming our ancestors were idiots. Millennia of trial and error is a pretty effective teacher. [Image source]

On a practical level, there are a ton of vital consequences to concern ourselves with. The various practical means with which we encourage monocropping, for example, create a massive economic incentive to do so. Altering public policy to elimninate this economic incentive this would have massive ecological benefits, as well as making our farms more sustainable in the long run. There are countless other arenas in which this is true- we cannot force complex systems like our world to behave simply without causing immense damage.

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Bibliography:

• Seeing Like A State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed, by James C. Scott
• 1491 : New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus, by Charles C. Mann
• Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations by David R. Montgomery
• An Environmental History of the World, by J. Donald Hughes
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_landowner_assistance_program#American_Tree_Farm_System
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Sisters_(agriculture)
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_cropping
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polyculture
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bras%C3%ADlia
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-field_system