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The Climax Economy

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From the day I started work at Organic Gardening and Farming magazine in early 1970, I felt that there was something intrinsically “right” about the organic idea. At first I didn’t quite know what it was, but I felt that something about its philosophical thrust was applicable to far more than the garden or farm.

Over the years, I’ve learned what that feeling is about. In 1970, we as a society were still hooked to the reductionist way of learning and doing—that is, if we just pick things apart enough, we can find the secrets of what makes it tick. Organics, on the other hand, went in the opposite direction. It was holistic. If we just see how something is linked to everything else, then we can understand what it is and what it does ever more deeply. It was the insight of ecology—that everything is linked to everything else. That you can’t stir a flower without troubling a star.

This holistic idea has been around for many hundreds of years, even if ecology is still a fairly new science. The Unicorn Tapestries in The Cloisters in New York depict a medieval allegory of a group of men hunting a unicorn in order to capture and tame it and own its power. The unicorn represents free nature. To capture it they have to kill it, which destroys what was valuable about the unicorn to begin with. The fable is a warning about reductionism. The key to understanding isn’t tearing something down to its most minute parts, but rather finding out how it fits into the grand scheme of things.

But 1970 was a long time ago: 46 years to be precise. At that time, we—the staff of the magazine—felt that our audience was “a little old lady in tennis shoes,” as the saying went around the office. That little old lady was then being joined by an army of young ladies and men who called themselves the hippies and reacted positively to the magazine’s advice that nature knows best, and to trust nature’s laws as being wise, and of promoting environmentalism. Then Earth Day happened, and organic gardening and farming—the agricultural and horticultural practices, not just the magazine—took off.

Organic gardening ceased being the backyard hobby of progressive and bohemian types and began to be taken seriously. The result, all these years later, astounds me. Just the other day, walking through Costco here in Santa Rosa, California, and seeing many islands of products and foodstuffs color coded as organic, with large banners proclaiming their organic provenance, I turned to Susanna, my wife, and said, “My God—we won!”

Trying to jump start organic growing techniques and organic (holistic) thinking in general was always a struggle. J.I. Rodale, who founded Rodale Press, the publisher of OG&F, was called a quack, a charlatan, a fraud, and worse. The government tried to destroy him. He was humiliated, dismissed, and reviled. But if you read his first book, “Pay Dirt,” it’s a well-researched and well-reasoned foundational book about soil science from an ecological perspective. I worked for J.I., knew him well, and although I thought he was a little wacky (I was the wacky one, because his advanced thinking on this topic was beyond me), I understood in my gut that he was right. His son Bob continued J.I.’s success and grew the business along with the importance of the organic idea. Now his granddaughter Maria runs the company and continues the work. I say hats off to the Rodales, for without them, we’d still be eating DDT.

So when I said, “We won,” it was the culmination of all those years of struggle that so many people participated in. We haven’t really won yet, as 95 percent of our food supply is still grown or raised conventionally, but the idea behind organics has won. The old guard that laid the framework for the idea is fading and beginning to slip into history. Generation X (ages 40-50), Millennials (in their 20s and 30s), and the iGeneration (people just now turning 21) understand the importance of sustainability, organics, environmentalism, and the role of social networking in promoting these values. The overwhelming majority of them “feel the Bern.”

Bernie Sanders is one of the old guard who helped lay the groundwork for the new framework that’s now second nature to the younger generations. He’s been saying the right thing for decades, fighting the fight when most people laughed at him. His shoulder was at the wheel when the wheel was just starting to get unstuck from the mud of conventional corporatist thinking. Hats off to Bernie, too.

But kudos to people who got us this far is important, but it isn’t the point of this blog today. I’d like to talk about the economy. And I’d like to talk about how the holistic, inclusive idea that lies behind your purchase or creation of organic food can be applied to economic thinking. So here goes:

Economic health has been predicated on economic growth. Successful companies grow. The GDP grows. Profits grow.

But is constant growth sustainable? Doesn’t constant growth define cancer? Can a company just keep growing forever, until—what? It takes over the world? And doesn’t constant growth imply growth by any means possible, fair or foul? And perpetual competition?

Well, nature should be our model in all things. We are part of nature and subject to her laws and forces, her tendencies and directions. And what does nature teach us about growth?

Organisms, like companies, grow, but then they die. Through their generations, they also diversify. In fact, the greater the biological diversity in any ecosystem, the healthier it is. The most biodiverse ecosystems aren’t ones in which individual creatures or kinds of creatures keep growing, but ones that have reached a climax ecology.

The encyclopedic definition of a climax ecology expresses a biological community of plants, animals, and fungi which, through the process of ecological succession in an area over time, reaches a steady state. This equilibrium is thought to occur because the climax community is composed of species best adapted to average conditions in that area, and which fill all the niches of ecological need for the health of the community.

Instead of being forced into ever-increasing growth, wouldn’t our economy be healthier if it could reach a steady state that supplies the various needs of all creatures in a way that’s sustainable for perpetuity?

What would such an economy look like? Looking again at nature, we see competition balanced with cooperation. We see interlocking beneficial relationships. We see peace between phenotypical players in a steady-state system, though there be winners and losers on the individual level.

In our current system, capital is the lifeblood of our economy. Accumulating capital is the objective. But in a climax economy, the wisest use of capital would be the objective. The benefit is not solely for any one business, but for the whole interconnected world of business, to produce goods and services that benefit the most creatures most efficiently.

It stands to reason that only the most efficient economy can be the most sustainable. We can already see what a climax economy looks like, see some examples of it emerging, and how we get there from here.

A climax ecosystem in nature sustains itself in perpetuity. All its trophic and functional niches are filled. It is stable. All its participants have what they need for their health and welfare. An economy is a similarly interconnected whole of suppliers and consumers. It too can reach a climax state. Businesses thrive as long as they are useful, then sink away and disappear when they are not. Just as in an organic garden predators and prey are in balance, heavy feeding crops are in balance with light feeders, and the lifeblood of the garden is the compost that’s recycled back into the soil, so in a climax economy businesses rise and fall according to their usefulness for the health of the whole, monetary resources are apportioned according to this balance, and profits are not heaped upon the fortunate few at the top of the economic food chain but are recycled back into the economy as a whole to strengthen and support it.

That’s a climax economy, and that’s where we should be going.

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A ROUND OF APPLAUSE FOR MONSANTO’S FAILING FORTUNES

Reuters reports that Monsanto expects its sales to remain flat for the rest of 2016 and possibly into the future. As a result, Monsanto’s shares fell more than seven percent and are now down almost 30 percent over that past 12 months as a result of steep decline in sales of Monsanto’s GMO seeds and toxic herbicide Roundup, which has been linked to cancer by the World Health Organization.

And the Wall Street investment bank Goldman Sachs has downgraded Monsanto to a sell, encouraging investors to dump Monsanto across the board.

This terrible news for Monsanto comes on top of the fact that Monsanto slashed its workforce by 16 percent, cutting more than 3,600 employees since late 2015.

Is it too soon to yell, “Yay!”

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