Last year, as in most previous years, I read a lot – I could probably be categorized as an information junkie, though I prefer to call it a mostly harmless side effect of my ambition of being a specialist of everything Anyhow, in the process, I also learned a lot. Which is great, I love learning. However, in the constant quest for new information, new research, new data, new this and that, individuals, companies, industries and even societies often lose track of what’s more important – application of the knowledge acquired. And I fear that is precisely what happened with me, too. As Bill Mollison pointed out:

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.

That may be a bit extreme, but there’s a very good point therein. At one end of the spectrum, we know how to make fuel-efficient cars, but we don’t. We know how to generate electricity sustainably, but by and large we don’t. We know how to farm truly sustainably, in a way that is healthy for the soil, humans and animals alike, but do anything but that. We know we shouldn’t be burning all those fossil fuels and using up all those resources quite at the speed we are, but we do. At the other end of the spectrum, we know we shouldn’t eat that chocolate or whatever, but we do. We know we should exercise, but we don’t. There is no shortage of such paradoxes, at all levels large and small, and failing to apply what we know might very well be the ultimate curse of humankind.

Which is why I’m planning on dialing down the reading in 2012 – not stop, never going to stop, but reduce. I have also pledged not to buy any more books until I have finished my current reading list (that currently consists of this, this, this, this, this, this and this).

The plan is to begin shifting the balance from reading to reflection and producing rather than consuming text, and also subsequently action. I plan on spending more time thinking, reflecting on and synthesizing what I’ve learned and how it could be applied, spend some more time on writing what I think, and also doing what I think is sensible and needs to be done, hopefully reporting on that and also spending some more time with my other precious hobbies and life in general. I have came to realize that anything I read and learn – anything anyone reads or learns – doesn’t really have any impact whatsoever unless I do something. It’s good to remember this point, formulated here by John Michael Greer in his great book The Wealth of Nature: Economics as if Survival Mattered (a book that I need to cover in another post):

It deserves to be remembered that a small step that actually happens will do more good than a grandiose plan that never gets off the drawing board, a fate suffered by nearly all of the last half century’s worth of grandiose plans for sustainability. Starting from personal choices and local possibilities, rather than abstract and global considerations, makes it a good deal more likely that whatever evolves out of the process might actually work. Tackling the crisis of industrial society from the top down has been tried over and over again by activists for decades now with no noticeable results. Maybe it’s time to try something else.

All this means the contents of this blog will, again, shift as well. Shift how? Maybe it’ll be towards something more opinionated. Shorter, more frequent posts, perhaps. Maybe I’ll have more photos again. Maybe recipes again. What I will try to do less of is pure reviews, that practically dominated my blog in 2011 – of the books that read and review, I’ll endeavor to add more insight and reflection to the review. More meat around the bones, even if the books themselves are already meaty. More personal.

Finally, maybe this shift will also elicit more comments from my readers – not that it’s a raison d’être for any blog’s existence but I don’t in fact know if anyone ever reads this blog anymore It continues getting plenty of hits – averaging around 1,500 page views per day – but something like 99,9% of them are probably spam, the vast majority of which is thankfully effectively captured and dealt with.

Although this lengthy post was all about whining about lack of real content, this post will ironically wrap up here, having no real content Consider it as a heads-up for changes ahead, and as a mental reminder for myself to start making the Transition (capitalization and pun intended).

One of the first things to note is that the book is NOT about unanimity, which many people confuse the term consensus with. The CODM-model for decision making seeks to make decision making an inclusive, collaborative process that aims for as big a consensus as possible, but it does not necessarily mean the decision is made unanimously. In fact, an entire chapter at the end is dedicated to going through the pros and cons of unanimous decision making; turns out there are many downsides to requiring absolute unanimity, and even many groups whose primary mode of decision making is unanimity, benefit from a less restrictive fall-back mode of e.g. supermajority or majority (which are probably the most suitable default models for most groups). The CODM model can be successfully used across the whole spectrum of decision-making rules, even when the actual decisions are made with the person-in-charge (i.e. by the boss) model. However, when resorting to the person-in-charge model, it’s crucial that the process and views emerging from it are respected by the authority figure – otherwise further engagements with the group will be undermined.

What is a group-based decision-making model good for anyway? Well, we all probably know all too well that if a decision or a line of action is simply thrust upon us, there is often little if any positive commitment to help execute the decision if our voices haven´t been heard at all. What’s more, few significant things can be accomplished by individuals, so this benefit from an engaged group decision-making is a very important one:

The shared ownership of a group decision can foster considerable commitment to the successful implementation of group-generated proposals. A “B grade” decision executed well because of a strong sense of shared ownership may have far better results than an “A grade” decision poorly implemented because of lackluster support.

That is a very important point; the overall long-term health of a group is typically much more important than any decision the group makes; hence it’s very important for the group members to feel included and respected in the decision-making process, even if they don’t always get everything everyone wants (which nearly never happens). So what is the CODM model? It’s a seven-step process that consists of:

1. Framing the Topic
2. Open Discussion
3. Identifying Underlying Concerns
4. Collaborative Proposal Development
5. Choosing a Direction
6. Synthesizing a Final Proposal
7. Closure

Each of the above steps consists of several sub-steps; the book goes in quite a bit of detail, down the providing very useful language guidance for facilitators in how to approach each of the steps and prepare and guide the group through them, as well as how to defuse situations that could lead to arguments and how to return the group to productive working mode. The work also ties in well with techniques such as Focused Conversation Method and Nonviolent Communication (NVC) developed by Marshal Rosenburg. Working in an environment where stakeholders are numerous and distributed widely, I noted that the book covers stakeholder engagement rather briefly and almost passingly mentions options for things like interviewing stakeholders – so that part of the process will probably need more emphasis in certain environments than is given to it in the book.

As I haven’t actually tried the CODM facilitation model in practice yet, I cannot comment on the efficacy of the model; it does, however, appear to be an extremely useful model and something that will certainly come in handy. It’s also a flexible model in that many of the steps can be skipped for certain types of decisions and some shortcuts (such as referring a decision to a committee) are provided for some steps that can be used where appropriate. It provides very useful frameworks as well as practical guidance that cannot help but make group decision-making more effective, if implemented properly. An unfortunate fact that I have noticed in many corporate environments is that often companies are unwilling to develop or use facilitation resources sufficiently; all too often dysfunctional group behavior is allowed to continue without even trying to bring some structure, such as CODM, into the decision making process. So the book is not only a highly useful guide from a practical point of view, but it also highlights the importance of skilled facilitators in many situations.

January was the height of summer here, and our first-ever vegetables were beginning to bear some fruit. The tomato plant was a success, but unfortunately some unknown animals (most likely possums) thought so, too, and ate a bunch of them. This year we are better prepared with nets.

Summer inevitably brings with it some critters, and it must be said that despite Finland having lots of forests etc, nature comes closer to you in Australia, even in the cities. Many people are not particularly fond of spiders, such as these pretty big huntsman spiders captured here on our fence in February. You may not learn to love them, but you do learn to live with them – and, as far as spiders go, the furry huntsmen are sort of beautiful, aren’t they?

I spent half of March working in Europe, in Brussels and Paris; over the weekend there, I think I exhausted most of Brussels’ interesting sights, from the Atomium pictured here to breweries and museums. While early March is not a particularly pleasant period to visit either city weather-wise, with spring yet to arrive, I do like Europe a lot, though Paris much more so than Brussels – even the ubiquitous crepes in Paris win the ubiquitous waffles in Brussels hands down

In April we went on a road trip, touring to Lakes Entrance, Buchan Caves, Snowy River National park (the edge of which is pictured here) and Canberra. Canberra turned out to live up to its reputation – clean, orderly, uncrowded, and somewhat boring. The kids, however, loved the wonderful science museum there, Questacon, and the War Memorial was pretty impressive as well.

Over the past couple of years, we’ve gotten to know and love the local farmer’s markets, like the closest one at Sir William Fry Reserve, a couple of kilometers from where we live – pictured here in May. The quality & selection of the produce is excellent, supporting local farmers is crucial and you can get some things you can’t easily find elsewhere; stuff like like venison, which makes for a very passable substitution for reindeer when making poronkäristys.

In June, for the first time in Melbourne, I hired a set of studio flashes for a photoshoot gig I did for a friend. Testing the equipment at home, our kids were the natural guinea-pigs and made for supremely cute subjects.

Late July we set off for Singapore for a couple of days’ stop-over on our way to Finland. Singapore is a great place to visit, particularly if you like good food or shopping – really all there is in the city are shopping malls and restaurants, or at least that what it seemed like. I wouldn’t want to live there, though – the climate is too hot & humid, people often not very nice and it’s not what you’d call a family-friendly city either. And I don’t like shopping. It was, however, good to catch up with some of the friendlier people in the city with our friends as guides.

After Singapore, we spent the entire month of August in Finland; it was the first time we went back after moving to Australia in 2009. I took some 7,000 photos during the month, many of which still need to be sifted through, selected and sorted, but the best moments were spent with family and friends; like this one, where me, my father and my son – three generations of men – are going fishing. Perfect, like many moments. Even the weather co-operated, with a sunny and warm August pampering us.

Some three days after returning from Finland, at the very beginning of September, I was off to San Francisco / the Bay Area for a business trip. What made this trip particularly great was that there are now some three good friends living in the area, and that I got to spend a weekend there which meant lots of hiking at various National, State and County parks.

By October, summer (by Finnish standards anyway, the official one starts in December) was in full swing in Melbourne, and many of the warmer evenings were spent on the beach – the kids never get tired of water and sand, and hanging around at the beach is not an entirely unpleasant way to spend time for adults, either One of the highlights was when Amanda found a bunch of live starfish from our local beach.

In November, we spent some time at the local botanical gardens; this flower is from the Royal Botanic Gardens Cranbourne that has great picnic areas and interesting tasks for kids, whereas the Melbourne version has some great water features in the summer, like water vapor fountains, artificial rain in the “rainforest” section of the children’s garden and a small artificial river for wading in.

At the end of December, we went on a vacation for a week to a destination that raised quite a few eyebrows here; we were going to Canberra. Again. Most Australians are generally perplexed why anyone ever bothers going to Canberra, let alone twice within a year – but really it’s not all that bad.

The primary reason for going back was that ever since our visit in April, our kids had been begging to go back to Questacon (the great science museum). And since a) science is a good thing to be excited about, b) one of the best sources of joy is seeing kids happy and c) it wasn’t a good time of the year to visit other destinations on our to-do list (Uluru and Cairns), off to Canberra it was. To be fair, we did include a few other places in the itinerary, too – wonderful experiences like seeing kangaroos in Tidbinbilla, good food in Canberra and quite a few good sights in Cowra (of all places!). We finally made it to a couple of cave tours at Jenolan Caves, too, which were simply awesome:

It felt like 2011 was a year when I did very little traveling in, but looking back it seems I’ve been traveling abroad or domestically in Australia for over 20% of the year, most of it on vacation, which doesn’t feel so little after all. Anyhow, it’s been mostly a great year for me personally (I’ve learned a lot) & our family, and despite the alarming emerging macro trends I’m hoping that streak will continue in 2012.

As for the first day of 2012, I am writing this on January 1st, 2012 and it’s a scorching ~+35C outside with the UV index at 11. I’ve raked a couple of hundred liters of flowers from our driveway (this is a daily exercise this time of the year, as the 20m tree generates a near-infinite number of flowers), the kids have had their water play in the balmy morning weather, and are now enjoying some downtime. A siesta would sound attractive, as would hitting the beach – but probably won’t do that until later in the day after some of the heat dies down. Tomorrow the temperature is forecast to head beyond +40C, but luckily it’s a day off to compensate for January 1st falling on a Sunday – so it’s shaping up to be a rather relaxed start for 2012. Maybe I can even read some of the books that I meant to read on our vacation this past week, but didn’t even open

Happy 2012!

As one would expect from a book as massive as this, there are too many points to highlight. Some of what personally caught my eye, however, are:

• Timelines are given as a guidance on the design; one cannot do a good garden design in one evening, and there are useful guidance figures to give an idea as to the amount of time and effort that goes into the planning process – that, as well as practical tools to help you get there.

• In permaculture, having a single systems element perform multiple functions is important; Edible Forest Garden highlights beauty and prettiness as one of these aspects, which is not just a nice touch but a really important aspect, considering beauty is the guiding principle of most gardens out there and one cannot expect for people to just disregard that in search of useful plants.

• There is heaps of practical, hands-on advice for design and building. One of the more interesting elements was the chicken moat combined with an electrical fence as a way of keeping unwanted wild animals away from the garden while providing a chicken run and vertical room for vines etc. There are also extensive site preparation and soil improvement techniques and tree planting techniques, described in enough detail that even I could to that

• A small but important point is made about the detrimental fruit perfectionism; people buy only fruits that look “perfect”, whereas one should really be more skeptical about apparent “perfection” in fruits than natural variation and visual blemishes. I am happy to report Australians aren’t quite as bad at this than the Finns, but both nations have room for improvement here.

• The approach taken is very much that of real life, not just perfectionist theory. For example, the malleable nature of one of the permaculture founding principles – zoning – in real life is well recognized and examples given of “real-life” zoning.

• Turns out each specialty has its own vocabulary; Edible Forest Garden lays out the various vocabularies needed to discuss things like landscapes in plain language, yet in sufficient detail.

• This book delivers something the majority of permaculture literature just glosses over; quantified yield figures. It also quantifies many other things as, including nitrogen needs for specific plants etc. The yield figures are, of course, guidances, but it still helps to know that out of e.g. a single mature kiwi plant you one can expect an annual yield of 50-60kg/year.

In addition to the highly practical and valuable main parts, possibly the most useful part of this book, however, can be found at the appendices – of which there are 200 pages worth. There is an incredible amount of information in the plant species matrix; habitat & growth environment tolerances, root patterns, soil needs, plant architecture, uses & functions, drawbacks (such as thorns) and so on, for hundreds of plants!

That alone makes this book an amazing resource and an extremely useful reference. Then there are species by use-tables, by-function tables, separate sections for herbs and spice plants, tea & beverage, medicinal plants, ground covers etc. Flowering times are there, as are useful indicative life spans, animal needs of selected species etc.

Personally, this book was also a little bit (a lot really!) frustrating to read, as I do not have any land of my own currently where to implement these ideas. Looking at the USDA hardiness zones reveals an interesting fact; while the book was written with North-East USA in mind (hence the “temperate” in the title), many of the species discussed can actually survive not only here in Victoria (which is USDA Zone 9 or 10) but also in Finland, which falls under USDA hardiness zone 5, the same as Maine where the authors live. I do, however, suspect more limited sunlight in Finland during the darker months may exclude some of the more borderline species.

Overall, the two-volume Edible Forest Gardens set is a highly useful, fascinating and in-depth resource for designing a forest garden / permaculture garden. I cannot think of a more comprehensive book for those wanting to design a yard that keeps on giving. Even though I have no practical experience to speak of from implementing most of the advice here, I still feel comfortable recommending the book. And even if you, too, are not in a position to actually do anything about it right now, the books make for supremely interesting reading and contain probably the most comprehensive collection of species information in the permaculture literature today.

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.

So I set about to educate myself, and our kids, about the trees here. After some research, I concluded that the best book to do that with would be CSIRO’s publication Forest Trees of Australia by Boland et al. This is one massive text; at over 700 pages and 2+ kilograms in weight, it’s hardly a field guide – but it is, from what I can tell anyway, an extremely comprehensive text about trees in Australia. It begins with a short introduction covering the trees, climate, topography, soils, microbes, fire effects and other factors affecting trees here.

The bulk of the text consists of species descriptions, over 300 of them, each species with two pages. The left-hand page contains the common names and botanical names, related species, climate where the species lives, map of its distribution, descriptions of the bark, leaves, cones, fruits, wood etc – interestingly including points about forestry uses, such as durability, wood density and common uses. The page on the right-hand side has a dozen or so pictures of the tree bark, leaves, fruits, flowers etc. Unfortunately the vast majority of the photos in the book are black-and-white, but the photos are extremely clear and come with size guides.

Towards the end of the book there is an extensive glossary and the usual references & an index. Due to its heft, it’s a book that I will likely never read every page of, but it is absolutely fascinating reading. For example, I did not know that the Mountain Ash (Eucalyptus regnans) here is, at up to 100m in height, the second-largest tree species in the world, only exceeded in height by the California redwoods.

Another revelation that the book brought with it is that there are lots of different species of trees here, many of which look very similar to each other. This makes accurate identification somewhat painful. There are a total of approximately 30 tree species in Finland – over here, just the eucalyptus genus has over 700 species. Given time, I am sure I will learn to identify some of the most common ones, but all of them? Forget it. Never going to happen. While a more compact field guide may come in handy at some point (the most compact of them all, the Leafsnap app by Columbia University, doesn’t really work well here), the Forest Trees of Australia is an indispensable reference loaded with fascinating information.

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?