Despite its age, Competing for the Future translates very well to today. Understandably some of the examples mentioned are outdated, but that’s always the risk with example cases. One of the most important messages is to reward unorthodoxy – and exhorting the fact that it’s vital to be unorthodox – something that is still missed in most companies. A story from a big pharma company chairman illustrates it well, in that he regularly tracks down projects that were rejected long before they reached the board. Why?

I know that whatever we get to see at the board level is going to be pretty consistent with our existing model of the business. I’m looking for the projects that are a bit off the wall, that could change our model of the business.

Another point well worth heeding is that restructuring or acquisitions often don’t work, and that incessant downsizing is the equivalent of corporate anorexia. A company is surrendering today’s business if it gets smaller faster than it gets better, and surrendering tomorrow’s business when it gets better without becoming different. A related point that is also highlighted is that most companies are overmanaged and underled.

One eerily accurate prediction is made when talking about the music business. Remember, this was in 1994;

Now imagine a world in which there is a broadband, two-way communication into the home. You can call up on a screen the top 1,000 or 10,000 pieces of music – song-by-song, symphony-by-symphony, aria-by-aria. You can read what the critics have said about the particular selection and listen to a 90-second sample, to see if it suits your musical tastes. Once satisfied, you can have your chosen selections downloaded onto a digital recording device. At the end of the month, you get a bill. Take it a step further, and you can even imagine a “home juke box” where you could order up an evening’s music – personally customized, of course – to accompany a 1960s rock-and-roll party, a romantic dinner for two, or a backyard Tex-Mex barbeque. [..] Think what will happen to record stores as we know them – poof, they’re gone!

Sound familiar? The “music-by-theme” bit is still lacking a bit, but other than that detail, all of the above – and more – is delivered by Apple’s products, Spotify et al. Of course the book also has its share of predictions that didn’t pan out just as expected, but that’s the nature of innovation – win some, lose some. When searching for innovation, Hamel & Prahalad warn against being customer-led; customers are notoriously lacking in foresight, and by being customer-led you end up being a perpetual follower, and worse.

Overall, the book highlights many, many excellent points and gives great advice. It has its flaws, such as the outdated examples and a relatively shallow selection of example companies, but the advice offered is quite solid. Yet, after 20 years, at least 90% of the companies out there have not taken any of this advice, which is somewhat discouraging. Many points have also thereafter been successfully re-iterated and re-established in more recent best-selling business books by other authors. So what’s wrong? Do the people who have the power to change things – or feel they have the power to change things, as it’s rightly pointed out that revolutions don’t start from the top – in their company not read these, or just fail to act / follow through?

If you finalize a profit formula too early, or, worse, are compelled to conform financials to the core business’s profit formula, then when things change – as they inevitably will – you’ll end up making wrongheaded compromises.
[..]
Incubation should be focused on establishing profitability, but it’s critical not to put pressure on the project to reap revenues at any great pace until the acceleration stages and in many real cases, large-scale revenues won’t accrue until the transition stage [ed note: which takes place up to 8-10 years from launch].

Now, let’s take a look at a few facts; first, Seizing the White Space is focused on creating and nurturing new business models, a vastly different undertaking from simply new products. Second, tangible profits from implementing a new business model are, according to the book and common sense, not apparent immediately – they may take years to materialize, as noted above. Now, I think it’s a given that most businesses really care mostly about (sustainable) profits. With those points, here’s the problem: the book was published some 18 months ago. 18 months is hardly enough time for even the fastest adopters of the advice therein to show any real, large-scale, sustainable benefits that come from following the advice laid out in the book. That is, there simply cannot be any real-world proof that these ideas work – yet the book has received rave reviews. Why?

It’s because of this revelation that I suddenly find myself hesitant in recommending it. That doesn’t mean it’s not filled with useful tools or sage advice – it is. Seizing the White Space presents useful frameworks that help in identifying opportunities and it provides many good examples of things done both right and wrong. Among some of the noteworthy points are:

• Structure can unlock creativity; and of, course, improper structure can and often does inhibit it.
• The profit formulas of online retailers are highlighted in a very positive light; the fact that they can make big profits on small mark-ups is impressive, but it begs the question of how much further can one improve from there once all suitable business is online? Going from a 40% markup of a department store to a 5% markup of an online-only establishment is a big efficiency improvement, but you can’t improve another 35 percentage points from there, now can you?
• There’s a good point in noting that needs-based, or voice-of-the-customer analysis, is not sensible despite it sounding like a good idea. Instead of asking “What do you need?” from customers, companies should start asking – or actually rather than asking, observing and analyzing – “What are you trying to get done?”
• Many books bring this point out, but it’s worth repeating because as many companies fail in that; one must keep idea / innovation incubation effort free of interference from the core [business] and the way it operates. Innovation cannot be managed per se, but it can and should be inspired, supported and encouraged.
• Companies often falter in discontinuities; “When faced with industry discontinuities, many companies falter. Some fail to recognize the complicated external forces propelling the event, or if they do they’re unable to trace the implications correctly or completely. Others hold tightly to their old paradigms and try to adapt them gradually to meet the changed circumstances.” Sound familiar in, say, the mobile industry?

Another interesting point was the notion that the world of business has become pretty dynamic or chaotic, depending on your viewpoint. It’s pointed out that:

If ever there was a time that business could just execute year after year and achieve lasting success, it is long gone. [..] But there comes a time when established product lines fully mature, when process innovation reaches the upper thresholds of efficiency, and when new product development slows. Then companies face a looming shortfall – a growth gap – between their desired growth path and the growth that the existing business and envisioned adjacencies can deliver.

Of course, the above rhetoric has a deeply-embedded view that eternal growth is not only possible, but also desirable and indeed crucial for companies. Anyone who has read more than this post on my blog by now knows that I do not share that view. But let’s leave that argument aside – after all, it is possible for a single company or even an industry to keep growing even in the long-term, just not the whole economy as an aggregate.

Even though I can’t really recommend the book, due to reasons discussed above, I do not want to discourage reading it either. In the context of the traditional business paradigm, it certainly provides helpful frameworks and guidance to steer companies toward a more dynamic, responsive, less restricted future – and we all know business model innovation is sorely needed in many areas. Seizing the White Space is a good guide for accomplishing that, and certainly much better than doing nothing.

It’s important to point out that this book in all its analysis completely omits worrying about possible resource constraints; some readers, who don’t share the limited resources-view will find this refreshing, others like myself will wonder how some people can be so blind to them. What one thinks about the omissions, however, is not important as the arguments in the book stand on their own. One of the central arguments in the book is basically that there must be an infinite number of new opportunities or the market can’t drive the economy forever – it is noted that the opportunities may not in fact be infinite, and that we already appear to be reaching the limits of business development in some areas. What is the limit, one may ask? A very simple one that applies to many, if not most, industries: one cannot produce goods at lower than no cost and faster than in no time. Larsson is very careful not to claim that everything has been invented, but it’s hard to argue with the point that the need for investments, which the economic growth depends on, will be lower in the future as as the law of diminishing returns sets in. It it also argued that we have, in the past, mainly made existing activities more efficient and invented few genuinely new activities.

An interesting note is that as efficiency improves and people place more emphasis on lower costs the average profitability of companies declines, providing there is “healthy” competition. This is, in fact, dangerous:

As we will see below, the economy needs companies that earn good profits, and in order to do this, companies need to be able to develop skills that lead to sustainable competitive advantage. The reason for this is that profitable companies are the ones that drive investments and economic growth in the economy, which is a very important role indeed. If average profitability declines, because it is becoming more and more difficult to develop sustainable competitive advantages, we will find that investments will decline, which would endanger future economic growth.

Some other interesting points include:

• The difficulty of identifying industries that need more people in the future, which leads to suggestions of either big structural changes needed or permanent large unemployment
• Identifying some absolute hard limits to product usage and consumption (such as caloric intake limits, time limits etc)
• Companies achieve superior profits through being different, but there is a strong drive is to implement systems that increase similarity

All in all, the prospects of wide-based economic growth in the long term look pretty grim. As a potential cure to the situation, The Limits of Business Development and Economic Growth offers two new sources of growth. The first is has to do with secondary qualities and making people aware of them; environmentally friendly products fall into this category when customers are willing to pay a premium for products produced by responsible companies. In order to “scale up” the secondary qualities-focus, people need to realize their consumption patterns have created the current system, and that consumption pattern changes can radically alter the system.

The other, perhaps surprisingly, is introducing complementary local currencies. Complementary local currencies are monetary systems that are not based on the “traditional” fractional reserve banking and, as the term implies, local to typically a community, city or a region. They have been previously used successfully in times of high unemployment, can also work in large scale (Switzerland has 80,000 people using a WIR system and in France, 25% of the people use complementary currencies at least occasionally) and many are already in existence. There are many types of local currencies with LETS (Local Exchange Trading System) schemes probably the most popular ones. Importantly, local currencies also make the monetary system much more resilient.

And resiliency is something that the world economy desperately needs; writing before the GFC(s) hit, Larsson points out:

The global economic system and the national currency systems that are linked to it, which most economists believe to be sufficient to guard society against economic instability, have shown a number of weaknesses in the past. [...] Yet we are doing almost nothing to try to investigate the possible weaknesses or limits that this system has, or how these weaknesses can be removed or how the system can be strengthened. Our belief in the economic system seems anomalous in the light of its track-record and it may lead our thought more in the direction of religious worship than in the direction of scientific analysis. Economists sometimes defend the existing national currency system and its virtues unquestioningly in the same way that fundamentalist religious leaders defend their beliefs. It is difficult and disturbing to try to ask important questions and only be offered the answers of economic doctrine and hypotheses that are weakly supported by experience.

Some criticism

The book starts perhaps a little bit slow, some examples are a bit outdated and there is too much repetition of some core hypothesis. These are relatively minor shortcomings and as noted, more recent examples only serve to strengthen the case, not weaken it. Partly due to its age, the book misses some key developments – for example, when talking about production optimization, it misses the trend of 3D printing for distributed manufacturing as perhaps the final step in efficiency gains as it eliminates transport time delays for certain goods. It’s also interesting to see that as the book was written in 2004, it goes into talking about print-on-demand in some length and does not even begin to take into account the e-books, which now make most print-on-demand schemes seem woefully outdated. These understandable misses do not, however, make the core arguments any less convincing, quite the contrary. With e-books, the delivery time really cannot be further improved from “immediate”, and the cost of delivery is practically zero.

Books are looking like a good example of advanced transition into e-business (Larsson provides an e-business development model), and it’s important to note that as a whole this transition and efficiencies it brought did not drive economic growth; cutting costs to drive profits is not a sustainable basis for growth and thanks to the success of online orders and more recently e-books, bookstores are a quickly disappearing feature of the physical cities. E-business, when it becomes mature, reduces resource usage and optimizes the system and in the end only serves to reduce economic activity when the transition is fully completed.

In Conclusion

I would highly recommend the book, but like I pointed at the beginning, the most remarkable thing I learned from it is not solely due to this book by itself – the book is more like another piece to what is forming to be a rather alarming puzzle. It is very interesting and somewhat disconcerting how an increasing number of different lines of highly credible and logical analysis come to essentially the same conclusion: that economic growth is coming to an end, and that massive changes will result from that. Larsson’s suggestions for finding economic growth in novel areas and ways, such as secondary qualities, proper support of small businesses and local currencies, may go some way of softening the landing for at least some industries – I would, however, be more skeptical that it could prevent growth from stopping, taking all the other challenges into account. But I would agree with Bernard Lietaer, whose work Larsson references, in that the “Official Future” scenario of the business-as-usual type for the future of our economies is, by far, the least probable alternative future.

One important thing to note is that despite the name, these books are not about creating “forests” per se, but mimicking the interconnectdness, sustainability and resilience of forests. It’s not about organic agriculture either; organic agriculture attempts to move agriculture toward the ‘nature’ end of the agriculture-nature continuum, maintaining high yields while reducing negative characteristics such as high rate of nutrient flux, high fragility, low resilience, low biodiversity, high amount of management effort required, high amounts of waste & pollution produced etc. Forest gardening, on the other hand, starts at nature’s end and attempts to increase yields while maintaining all of nature’s desirable characteristics (typically the opposites of that list).

Trees certainly play a role here, but are not the only plants of relevance – and you do not need acres and acres of land to implement the ideas. Instead the book specifically focuses on smaller-scale solutions and systems, often making the designs more applicable to real life than those in Mollison’s Permaculture Designers Manual that I recently read & reviewed (it should, however, also be pointed that this book covers a much narrower scope, but does so in more detail and with more up-to-date information).

To begin with, Edible Forest Gardens lays out some reasons why we should start radically re-thinking our food production; to mention just one interesting point is that when fossil fuel usage is included, traditional industrial agriculture often has a negative net energy production. That alone should ring some serious alarm bells.

The book covers a large number of fascinating details about soil structure and soil life (and how critically important it is to healthy ecosystems), social structure of forests and many other things. It also provides an overview to four perspectives on vegetation dynamics, starting with how the traditional linear succession and climax model and how it is not exactly true (I vaguely remember this linear succession model from school), then introducing three other theories; progressive succession to shifting-mosaic steady state, patch dynamics and a unified old field theory.

Previously I mentioned that quantifying yields is one aspect lacking in many permaculture materials; these books do provide some data on typical yields in different ecosystems; it’s interesting to note, for example, that agricultural land yields around 3000 kcal/m2/year, whereas temperate forests yield almost twice that and tropical forests and swamps even more in terms of raw net primary productivity (NPP). Nevertheless, more work on this area is still needed.

The text, while firmly under the permaculture umbrella, introduces only some permaculture principles (and omits others). Included are things such as polycultures and guilds, the latter which is defined here as “groups of species that partition resources or create networks of mutual support” – probably the tightest and best description of it I have seen so far.

In the sustainability discourse, there continues to be much talk and debate about suburbs and their fate. Many argue that suburbs cannot be maintained when fossil fuels become scarce and expensive (like argued in the documentary “End of suburbia“), while others quite convincingly claim we simply can’t afford to just abandon them either. This book takes a view that probably best aligns with my own thinking (and also aligns well with the permaculture edict of “the problem is the solution”) – that despite being generally poorly suited to dealing with energy decline, suburbs actually represent one of the best opportunities for sustainable design and living.

“There are more people with a little bit of land in these habitats than in any other. In the cities, people have far fewer opportunities to connect with any semblance of the natural world, much less to be self-supporting in any major way. Rural areas have too few people for high productivity without machinery driven by fossil fuels.”

There is no question that ultra-commutes, particularly with cars, will become difficult to maintain, but suburbs can provide a good basis for relocalization – and with good communication technology infrastructure, it should be possible for most knowledge-workers (those who primarily commute to begin with) to work remotely. This transition is probably easier in places like Melbourne where many suburbs are already relatively lively places filled with services and small local merchants, as opposed to many US suburbs where there is no local service-infrastructure and the little there is are shopping centers or strip malls.

The book ends with a “Top 100″ species list, their growth environments (zones, sunlight preference), size, what they produce etc. There are also comprehensive reference and publications lists and a glossary at the end.

Much of this book is theory. Theory, for many people can be rather boring, which brings me to one of the best aspects of this book; it is very professionally written, well laid out with clear illustrations and in general is a joy to read. Mollison, for example, can at times be a bit rambling, but happily this work does not suffer from such superficial annoyances. The polished, well-researched presentation of interesting material makes Edible Forest Gardens yet another recommended book, but naturally only if you find the topic somewhat interesting.

I have a lot of books on my reading list right now, so getting to the Vol 2 of this great work may take some time. Nevertheless I’m really looking forward to that after the fascinating background in this first volume – next up, however, will be some more business and innovation-oriented books related to my day job.

Physically the phone is, of course, identical to iPhone 4. Not much more to say about it. I always liked the design, brittle though as it is, and build quality is top-notch. The screen is still great, and I for one do not want a bigger screen if it means a bigger form factor – I find devices with a 4.5″ screen are too big for my taste.

The camera was one of the biggest reasons I was looking forward to the 4S. I take a lot of photos, though mainly still with my DSLR – however, the best camera is the one you always have with you and so the camera on my phone matters. On one trip, I actually carried a Nokia N8 just as a my point-and-shoot camera as I didn’t want to take along a DSLR but didn’t want to rely on the iPhone either. Since the N8 is considered to have the best camera in any mobile device, I took some comparative photos with my “old” iPhone 4, the new iPhone 4S and the Nokia N8.

First, a small version of a scenery and a close-up taken with the three phones. You can click the image to get the original-sized pictures of all six (it’s a 16MB image and note the images are in different order in the big one):

Below is a 1:1 non-resized crop of the above; i.e. all images below are at the native resolution, 1 pixel here representing 1 pixel from the image file:

As you can see, the exposure and white balance varies quite a bit among the three devices. The 4S seems to do a better job at shot exposure than the 4, with the N8 probably being the closest to truth in terms of white balance. The Nokia N8′s 12MP seem to be a bit of an overkill, with the 1:1 cuts showing distinctly “softer” pixels than either iPhone.

Overall, the camera on the iPhone 4S is pretty good and will work well as a P&S replacement. Even though the N8 is probably still better, it’s not better by a very big margin – as such, I will leave it home from now on. The much-improved camera startup time is also a welcome thing.

I have not done any comparative low-light testing yet; I find even the good “real” P&S cameras suck at low light, so I have not attempted to do any serious low-light photography without my DSLR. I doubt this will change with the 4S.

Biggest surprise

The biggest positive surprise was Siri. The natural-language speech recognition-driven assistant actually works well – much better than I expected and definitely well enough to be very useful. It’s cool, convenient and a big time saver, too. For example, setting a timer (I timed these ) took me 7.5 seconds on my lock-enforced iPhone 4 and just 4.5 seconds with Siri’s help on the 4S.

Disappointingly, it cannot look up services, locate maps or give directions in Australia yet – lack of restaurant info in Australia I can understand since Siri so far relies only on Yelp, but I can’t figure out why it doesn’t do directions.. It helps to have a good network to run the phone on when using Siri as the speech recognition is a server-assisted process. Oh, also: do not even attempt to have Siri read Finnish text to you

I wish the speech synthesis would improve (it’s pretty robotic as it stands), that it would be integrated with more services, that it would still improve the recognition accuracy (it’s very good, but not perfect) etc etc – but the bottom line is that it’s very useful as it is and will likely only become more so. I still remember when some 14 years ago, I & a friend were testing the then-state-of-the-art speech recognition system with the phrase “testing speech recognition” – and the result was “the whole world had nothing to eat“. Back then I thought the technology is maybe not quite ready for prime time yet, but now? Now I’d say it is.

Other improvements

Naturally there are many other improvements as well; one thing that had bugged me for two years is now solved – the calendar works in landscape mode and has a sort of a week-view that works very well. More speed across the board is always welcome, from in-device to network connectivity. With regards to network-connectivity, HSPA+ seems to work; testing just now, I got 89ms RTT, 8.75Mbps downlink and 1.1Mbps uplink – not too bad (naturally YMMV here depending on your network).

In conclusion, I’m quite happy with the 4S. So no star-rankings here, spec or performance comparisons or that other typical stuff, but if the user is happy that’s all that matters, right?

Permaculture ethics is about care of the earth (caring for the soil, forests and water), care of people (looking after self, kin and community), and fair share (setting limits to consumption and redistributing surplus) – as an umbrella, those are the themes under which the contents of the book falls. As Permaculture is a synthesis of different disciplines, the book covers an absolutely huge range of topics and has an incredible amount of information. There’s no way I remember most of it after first reading, so the book makes an excellent reference text and there’s clearly no room to cover anything but a tiny fraction of points worth mentioning in a review such as this. Permaculture is not necessarily new information as such and the introduction of the book has a thought-provoking suggestion; “Perhaps we should do nothing else for the next century but apply our knowledge. We already know how to build, maintain and inhabit sustainable systems, but in everyday life of people this is hardly apparent.”

There is a profound truth in that; too often we seek only new information, new solutions, over-analyze things, research the most trivial details and publish the results of countless useless studies just so there is something novel – all the while forgetting to apply the knowledge we have accumulated. This applies in corporate world as well as for the society as a whole; implementation is often the weakest link. We know a lot of solutions to many problems, but fail to act. All too often the academic fallacy of “I think, therefore I have acted” is apparent. And I readily admit that I, too, am guilty of that.

Mollison vocally criticizes the destruction of ecosystems, and rightly so. He points out that as we have destroyed energy-producing ecosystems and replaced them with our own energy-consuming “improvements”; “We have assumed the role of the creator, and destroyed the creation to do so.”. But 100% healthy, balanced vegetarianism in northern countries such as Finland is a tall order to achieve sustainably when fresh vegetables are imported for half the year or grown in very energy-intensive greenhouses.

There is also an interesting point made about vegetarianism;

“Only in home gardens is most of the vegetation edible for people; much of the earth is occupied by inedible vegetation. Deer, rabbits, sheep and herbivorous fish are very useful to us, in that they convert this otherwise unusable herbage to acceptable human food. Animals represent a valid method of storing inedible vegetation as food.”

Mollison doesn’t argue against vegetarianism as such, and notes it is very efficient but only under specific circumstances (locally grown easily processed food with wastes returned to the soil where the vegetables were grown). I would imagine it’s a fairly tall order to eat a sustainable, healthy, balanced, all-vegetarian diet in places like Finland where fresh veggies and fruit are imported or grown in extremely energy-intensive greenhouses for half the year.

Another interesting points also hits close to Finland; that burning peat is evil. Peat can be used for making more precious topsoil, as a great growing medium in nurseries, or as an insulator in buildings. It should, Mollison notes, only “in desperation” be used as fuel. Finland, however, produces as much as 8% of it’s electricity by burning peat – and the European Union classifies peat as a “slowly renewing” biomass fuel. The “slow” is indeed slow, with a peat bog taking 1,000-5,000 years to regrow. Additional dose of evil comes from the fact that burning peat produces even more CO2 than coal.

There is far too much practical advice in the book than one can narrate here; there are solutions from water purification to water conservation, from productive system design in various climates to strategies to increasing yields. Soil structure and improving it are given lots of coverage, up to and including how different soil types affect buildings. There’s loads of fascinating information about trees and forests – and there’s also quite a bit on different designs & theories, including an interesting chapter on patterns.

The last chapter of the book deals with reorganizing societies and nations along more sustainable lines. Considering the breadth of all this, the chapter is necessarily brief overview but even as such, it is much more detailed than discussion in the mainstream where no such alternatives are even considered (yet). A lot of facets are covered; investment, alternative monetary systems, local currencies, village development, societal structure and support structures, decision making strategies etc.

Some criticism

Obviously there are downsides to such a massive book as well. One is length and depth; it’s not an easy book to read. Some drawbacks stem from the fact that the text is now over 20 years old (it was published in 1988). While this may lead some to assume the content is outdated, I was quite surprised how up-to-date it all was; for example, there was a statement that there is “no longer any doubt” about anthropogenic climate change, way before climate change made it to the headlines. Anyhow, one of the downsides that I assume comes with the age of the book are illustrations; they are mostly black-and-white hand drawings – while impressive, some of the more complex pictures and diagrams can be difficult to decipher and aren’t all that pretty.

Another problem – or rather, limitation – stems from the fact that many solutions and designs presented require a lot of space. This is understandable considering the origins of permaculture, but obviously not everyone has – or even can have – the land required for many of the solutions described. Applying permaculture principles to urban areas has received more attention recently so some of this information is available elsewhere better adapted to environments where most of us live today (see, for example, the upcoming Urban Permaculture DVD)

One of the major issues not touched by almost any permaculture work is quantifying the yields. Another well-known permaculture “guru” Geoff Lawton has made some pretty outrageous claims that are relatively easy to disprove. While Mollison does give some yield guidance figures for things like aquaculture, he also mentions that yields “have no known limits” and for the most part does not give even approximate yield expectations based on current best practices. While it’s true yield limits are not known, there certainly are limits to sustainable yields and I believe they can not be orders of magnitude more than achieved with e.g. organic agriculture. Quantification of achievable sustainable yields is something more attention needs to be paid to, and something I hope to return to later as well. The reluctance for quantifying yields in the permaculture movement is curious considering one of the most influential sources of inspiration of the permaculture concept, natural farming innovator Masanobu Fukuoka, published very precise yields for his fields. It’s time for permaculturalists to do the same.

Conclusion

Permaculture – A Designers’ Manual is not an easy read. It does, however, give so much food for thought as well as a plethora of practical tools to improve things that it’s a remarkably important book. The solutions and practices described are not given at a high, abstract level, but instead you could easily implement most with the help of just this book. Having said that, it’s also not a book many people are willing to read, if only because of it’s heft. The topic however is critically important. If you’re not quite up to devouring this much at once, consider reading a brief, free e-book “Essence of Permaculture” [PDF] – it’s only 23 pages written by the other permaculture concept co-originator, David Holmgren.

That, if true, obviously has huge implications on pretty much everything as the current financial system in particular is, as we have seen, stable only in times of economic growth. If growth is over, there is an urgent need to reform not only the financial system but many other things. The End of Growth gives a relatively thorough, if necessarily brief, introduction to the current financial system, including its history, the nature of debt and how growth is required for its stability. Heinberg debunks many of the myths of substitution, innovation riding to the rescue etc. The reason is simple enough, and best explained in his words:

It is natural for readers to find this distressing. [...] It has been necessary to frame the issues this way because the end of growth is an inherently unattractive notion, and so most people are likely to avoid considering it, deny the evidence that it is occurring, and fail to contemplate its implications, unless presented with an airtight case in its favor. The end-of-growth argument therefore has to be made carefully, thoroughly, even somewhat redundantly. But it must be made. If the observation that growth is ending is in fact valid, and if policy makers and citizens don’t see or understand that economic expansion is no longer possible, they will continue to assume the impossible – that growth can and will continue indefinitely. In doing so they will increasingly be operating in a delusional state. People who are deluded this way may do things that make no sense in terms of the actual economic environment that is emerging, and will likely fail to do things that could help themselves and others adapt to new conditions. Opportunities will be wasted and human suffering will be increased unnecessarily.

That – avoiding to consider the end of growth – is precisely what we are seeing. From government policies to economic journalism, nobody in the mainstream dares to even contemplate the end of growth, because growth will supposedly solve all our problems. Even in the relatively down-to-earth Finland, politicians are blindly relying on projected future economic growth to even begin to deal with the debt load.

One could easily argue that the drivers behind the current sad state of affairs – that of reaching for ever-increasing economic growth – is human nature and cannot be changed; that inevitably we will only be stopped by a crisis, by a mass die-off at the latest. The paradox is that the sustainability revolution will occur, inevitably – but with each passing day of not planning and preparing for it, it becomes increasingly likely that the revolution will be driven by crisis and include much unnecessary suffering. But it is, in fact, not “human nature” to live outside sustainable bounds; it is learned behavior. Traditional societies planned ahead and lived truly sustainable lives; many indigenous people made decisions based on the likely impacts on the seventh generation yet to come. Today it’s rare to find decisions being made beyond the next quarter, year, election cycle or some similar very near-term-target.

.. so what do I do?

In the face of immense changes, it’s natural to ask what each and every one of us can and should personally do to adapt to the transition. While the end of the book is devoted to introducing initiatives such as the Transition, the book does not cover this “what should I do”-topic in great detail, as Heinberg concedes that while the trends are clear, broad and deep, the details of their unfolding can be surprising to everyone. While not giving practical advice out of fear for dishing out wrong advice is understandable, it doesn’t help those asking – I certainly have asked this question myself a number of times, and often even intense analysis does not provide a perfect answer, or the answer is at best inconclusive. But since inaction, or no movement from status quo, is the worst thing that one can do, providing what is likely to be beneficial advice is far better than providing no guidance at all.

In the same spirit, The End of Growth does provide a long list of practical advice. This, however, is not in the book itself but rather as a chapter on the book’s website at http://richardheinberg.com/the-end-of-growth-exclusive-supplemental-materials. It has a great list of practical advice to get one started – along with links to many more resources. Of the few practical advises in the printed book, I found one particularly interesting: getting to know your neighbors. Heinberg points out that most of us don’t know our neighbors today – at all – and that this could be a very dangerous thing at a time of crisis;

It’s hard to emphasize this point sufficiently; Get to know your neighbors. These may be people with whom you share very little in terms of politics, religion, or cultural interests; that fact is beside the point. When push comes to shove, these are the people you may need to depend on. Find ways – perhaps innocuous ones at first, such as a discussion about pruning a common shade tree or the sharing of surplus summer garden veggies – to make contact and to begin to build trust.

In conclusion

The End of Growth is an important book. The arguments it makes are not new, and have been discussed in various places and books earlier. It does, however, bring together the most recent financial crisis as well as other events and drives the point of us being at the end of growth home well – making, as it was said, an airtight case for it. We may still see some quarters or even a few years of economic growth, but after facing the facts, it does appear that some kind of delusion is required to think it will continue beyond that. It’s time to re-group and rebuild a society that we and our children can have a future in;

We’re at a similar junction today. Before us lies a future that will necessarily be very different from the one that our political leaders encourage us to envision. The only mental tools we have with which to imagine the possibilities that await us are ones honed in the past era of growth, extraction and combustion. As a result, we can’t hope to have a very clear picture of what life will or even could be like for our grandchildren of the children now being born.

What we can hope to do is make sure they have a future – that they will have even the possibility of existing and making their own contributions to our species’ unfolding story. In order for future generations to enjoy the barest of chances at life we must avoid the monetary-financial wall in our path, or ensure that the impact is minimal. And we must set a course toward sustainability and away from collision with Earth’s environmental limits. All of this will require us to question what we think we know, to leave our comfort zones far behind, and to engage in hard challenging work.

We will be tempted to waste time fussing over aspects of our current ways of life that may not be salvageable (including many of the goods we associate with economic growth). We will be tempted also to waste time apportioning blame for the failure of our existing economic and industrial systems, and venting anger over the greed and stupidity that stand in the way of building a new economy. None of this will help. The only efforts that will aid in the long run are those that contribute, in some tangible way, to the realization of a pattern of human settlement that is culturally and psychologically rewarding, and that supports rather than undermines the integrity of Earth’s living skin, our only home.

“…not about austerity or apocalypse; it’s about living a simpler, more joyful, more effective life. Homesteading is not a replay of a Depression-era mentality. It is a series of skills and practices that lift us out of a culture of inaction and cynicism into a culture of abundance, care and possibility.”

Something that one immediately notices when picking up the Urban Homesteading is that it’s a beautiful book. While a paperback, it’s printed on good-quality paper and is generously sprinkled with excellent photos and clear diagrams – some of which are there mostly to keep things beautiful. This is actually in line with the authors’ comments; they point out that some “hard-core” homesteaders or permaculturalists eschew planting something for purely aesthetic pleasure; the authors, however, consider beauty an important part of gardening. I tend to agree, but then again, nothing is ever there just for aesthetic pleasure – flowers attract pollinators and can indirectly be used for honey production, so the stacking of functions can still be there even if it’s not specifically planned for.

Urban Homesteading covers a wealth of topics and uses permaculture guidelines for structuring and implementing much of the stuff. While it has good coverage of growing foodstuff also, it is by no means “just” a gardening book – there are in-depth chapters of preserving food and a wealth of construction projects of various sizes. The projects are one of the best features of the book; there are many hands-on projects, from small to large, so there’s always something you can implement – but it’s also highly likely you’ll never get to try everything in the book. There are also many useful “transition frameworks” on various themes such as tending to water, energy conservation and moving from consumption to production, which outline clear, simple steps in a realistic timeframe that one can take – forming a sort of practical, if somewhat high-level, mini-plan.

One thing that I found really useful is that the book includes dozens of real-life examples and stories. Importantly, these stories aren’t just the success stories, but several people also openly tell of things that didn’t work, which helps keep things in the proper perspective. As is inevitable for a book with a wide scope, some things cannot be discussed comprehensively – for example, there are only short textual descriptions of butchering chickens, which are not going to be sufficient for learning from that alone. To compensate, there is a comprehensive references and resources-list at the back, which will direct you to a plethora of more detailed information on specific topics. All in all, Urban Homesteading is a great book, and serves as a semi-introduction to permaculture as well – I can highly recommend it. And at a mere $11 it’s a bargain, too!

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The book raised two topics about food that are worth thinking about a bit more; first the local food-movement and second, the availability of healthy food.

On local food; Urban Homesteading makes a call for eating as much locally as possible, highlighting the importance of local food. Naturally, food produced close-by has numerous positive aspects to it; there is the reduced transportation and emissions angle, but there is also the increased regional resilience-angle, both very important. Another important point about local food is that it is not, nor is permaculture, a call to self-sufficiency, but more about creating sustainable, resilient communities. All these aspects are recognized by many, although equally many still wrongly view self-sufficiency as some sort of holy grail of urban homesteading.

What is, however, missed by most who call for only-local-food is the fact that there are many people who live in areas of poor agricultural productivity and/or seasonal zero-production environments. While obviously preservation techniques can overcome the absolute need to ship food from far away, it does not address the nutritional deficiencies – or the simple pleasures of eating. It’s one thing to appreciate the seasonally available produce, but it’s an entirely different thing to learn to tolerate, let alone appreciate, canned and preserved foods for 6 months of the year if it’s impossible to grow anything fresh locally. It’s also a well-established fact that the so-called Mediterranean/Asian (or as one book calls it, Mediterrasian) diet is among the healthiest and best diets for human well-being. It, however, remains a fact of life that not even close to all locations on the planet are capable of supporting a Mediterranean diet year-round.

Clearly it’s no longer possible to have the entire human population live only in areas which are optimally suited to sustaining them, but equally clearly there will be an inevitable era of deglobalization of food distribution, if only because the economics of shipping kiwis 15,000km to consumers will become impossible to maintain. But even before this happens, it’s clear that eating only 100% local food is not the healthiest option for many people. Perhaps more attention should be paid on how to make the local food sources more varied and how to have healthy food sustainably on the table even in places that are frozen solid for half of the year.

On availability of healthy food; the Urban Homesteading book briefly mentions the problem of “food insecurity”, part of which has to do with healthy food not being available to all. There was an interesting related article in the Economist recently, which pointed out a couple of unfortunate facts; “the unpalatable truth seems to be that some Americans simply do not care to eat a balanced diet, while others, increasingly, cannot afford to”.

While it’s true that some people simply don’t have access to healthy food, and for some it is too expensive, I suspect there’s plenty of scope for many people in the Western countries to buy healthier food but buy less of it. With over 60% of Americans overweight and more than a third obese, it seems to me many could reduce their caloric intake and instead spend it on healthier, even if more expensive, food. (There is, perhaps somewhat surprisingly, no statistically significant link between obesity and socioeconomic status).

While the industrial-scale production is lacking in Australia, the residential production is doing a bit better. About a year ago, Australia had about 200,000 households using solar PV panels for electricity production, and that figure is increasing rapidly. Many, many more households have solar hot water systems in place. Both systems enjoy significant government incentives which unfortunately are being slowly scaled back.

Anyhow, to satisfy my curiosity and desire to understand in detail how the residential-scale systems work, I read the Solar Electricity Handbook – 2011 Edition by Michael Boxwell. This is a book that covers residential solar deployments in quite some detail, but focuses purely on residential PV panels. Now, one can be forgiven to think solar is easy – after all, how complicated can it be slap a panel on a roof and plug it in? Turns out it can be surprisingly complicated and the Solar Electricity Handbook is there the show you how.

The book basically covers pretty close to everything you need to know when planning, dimensioning, selecting, installing and operating a solar PV system for residential use. Some of the more interesting things to note for me were the various inefficiencies introduced by a number of the system components and features (batteris, MPPT, inverters, temperature etc), the numerous complexities introduced by systems with battery storage and the inherent dangers in solar panels.

Even such basic things as making sure the roof can handle the panel loads – and remembering that there can be a significant upwards lifting loads on the panels in windy conditions – easily slip the minds of a “layperson” such as myself, so it was interesting to learn about such details. Other news to me was the somewhat disappointing revelation that the vast majority of grid tie-in systems will shut down if the grid shuts down – grid fallback systems, on the other hand, continue to operate if grid power is lost. Also, it’s essentially impossible to switch a solar panel off – hence the connections and circuit breakdown conditions need to be managed carefully or they can easily lead to overheating or even fire. On a positive surprise-side, some people have occasionally complained of poor carbon payback times of the panels due to high production emissions; turns out the panels, depending on the method of manufacture, have carbon payback times of only 3-5 years – considering the panels have a lifetime of 20-30 years or even more, that’s a pretty good figure I think.

Solar in Australia is a no-brainer. Finland, however, seems like a pretty useless place for solar electricity when you first think about it. I was, however, surprised to find out that where the irradiance levels of Melbourne in December is 6.24 kWh/m2/day, it reaches 5.74 kWh/m2/day in Helsinki in July; so the output during the best times of the year do not radically differ between Melbourne and Finland. The story is obviously quite different in the winters, with Melbourne having irradiance levels of 4.07 kWh/m2/day even during the worst month (May), whereas the Helsinki winter level in December is a downright pathetic 0.66 kWh/m2/day. An additional complication to having any significant solar electricity generation take place in Finland is that the peak power usage occurs in exactly the opposite time of the year than peak production, whereas the peak production & consumption times align much better over here.

What comes to the Solar Electricity Handbook, it’s a great resource for planning and installing residential solar PV systems. It covers all the basics and the quirks introduced by different systems, and the online resources at http://solarelectricityhandbook.com/ are very useful. It does not, however, cover the most recent developments in any great depth, such as Solar Edge‘s technology of distributed maximum power point tracking, but the handbook definitely provides a good, solid foundation for anything thinking of installing PV solar systems.

One of the key background elements in permaculture – and one reason I was attracted to the concept in the first place – is that it draws much of its inspiration from dealing with the coming energy descent. While this means permaculture is related to the concept sustainability, its important to note that practically none of the so-called “sustainable” solutions, products, practices etc that are increasingly used even in marketing today, are really sustainable. While much is simply greenwashing, Holmgren argues that there is in fact no way of the current generation to achieve a truly sustainable lifestyle, an argument that John Michael Greer agreed with in his book The Ecotechnic Future. Specifically, Holmgren states:

In articulating Permaculture as the Principles and Pathways Beyond Sustainability, I am suggesting that we need to get over our naive and simplistic notions of sustainability as a likely reality for ourselves or even our grandchildren and instead accept that our task is to use our familiarity with continuous change to adapt to energy descent.

The book covers a great depth and breadth of topics in taking a deep-dive into the principles. Even ethical issues play an important role and there is one particularly insightful paragraph that I think captures well some fundamental societal problems:

Most philosophers acknowledge that ideas and values are never free of their ecological, economic and cultural context. However, few seem to be prepared to accept the degree to which energetically novel conditions of recent centuries are primary factors in the creation and spread of much of what we hold precious in human thinking and culture. In particular, we need to be suspicious of seeing the philosophy of individualism as the source, rather than outcome, of material well-being. Further, we should expect that the beliefs and values that have developed with a rising energy base are likely to be dysfunctional – even destructive – in a world of limited and declining energy.

Almost by definition – in that permaculture ought to be an integral part of designing our future during the energy descent – David Holmgren is highly critical of many aspects of modern society, from energy use to industrial agriculture and culture. He brings up many extremely valid points, including the one quoted above, that should give any reader a pause.

As is probably clear to the reader by now, permaculture is a very holistic concept and one that intimately deals with systems design and systems thinking, appealing to my interests in those areas. It has its drawbacks, however, one of which includes at times skeptic stance from the heavily “siloed” academia; the other founder of the concept, Bill Mollison, once commented that when introducing the concept of permaculture to academia, “The professional community was outraged because we were combining architecture with biology, agriculture with forestry and forestry with animal husbandry, so that almost everybody considered themselves to be a specialist felt a bit offended.” Permaculture itself, however, was conceived in academia and many more favorable comments have been made – as well as offering postgraduate-level courses on permaculture.

If you’re interested in the concept more widely than just when applied to gardening, I can highly recommend the book as a great and thought-provoking, introduction to the topic. Holmgren writes in a warm manner, includes “big picture” examples as well as his personal experiences from implementing the difference principles. Even the at times heavy criticism is delivered in a manner that is not offensive; as Holmgren puts it himself, “.. it is not necessary to denigrate what our parents, grandparents or ancestors did as ignorant, shortsighted or anti-nature”, but instead we can focus on more positive developments and preparing for the future.

If you’re wondering whether you should be interested in it, I offer you one quote from the book to end that captures the target audience rather well:

Permaculture is for those who already understand or sense the reality of transition and descent and want to give practical and integrated expression to that reality, whether the rest of the society is ready or not to do so.