How do you separate the personal from the professional? We are taught to deal in the ‘objective’, in measured things. But the whole idea of reimagining how we look at landscapes – our so-called ‘working lands’ of farms and forests and beyond – surely opens us to a reimagining of what is the essence of knowing a place, a piece of land, as connected, always connected, to other forms of life (bio) and the other forms of material (physical). What is a landscape? We have to look to the wider system because whatever we do, we do to the whole; and we never do just one thing within a complex and connected system.
Why separate? You cannot fully know landscapes if you do. You cannot understand, and therefore cannot make the wise decisions without that sense of a functioning whole. If you remove the children playing, or the caddisflies in the stream, if you do not extend the effects of fertiliser beyond mere pasture growth – on to soil biology and carbon, and then infiltration rates, and then drought, and then back to economic health, for just a start (I could go on and on) – then you are less wise, not more. Your focus is the problem, not the solution.
All those connections and functions are part of the system. The ‘cleverness’ of disassociated agronomy cannot compensate for the trade-offs it may create when applied without context. Without the wisdom to make the right choice instead of focusing simply on, say, increasing inputs to maximise yields, or increasing scale to reduce costs – it cannot see the consequences that are obvious to those who can connect. Reimagining includes ensuring you look to those patterns and connections beyond a single discipline. Ask the question, “What else have we done?” Because there is always something else.
Lines of connection and feedback ripple out from any act. We’ve put on a pedestal the idea that we can think and act within a measured box, when there is no box. The cleverness of any act is as of nothing before
the wisdom of the choice. Looking at land as if it is a reducible machine has turned that truth on its head. Disconnected cleverness has come to trump wisdom, and for each problem it creates, another piece of cleverness is devised; what Willard Cochrane called “the technology treadmill,” where the economic, social and environmental health of a place degrades until we lose Arcadia. Agronomists and other technocrats ought to read Plato. The story of Arcadia’s loss is being repeated not because technology is bad, but because it alone cannot make the right choices without a reimagined concept of the whole.
So look to land as an integrated whole. People live in it. Animals are born and die. Energy flows from the sun to layers and side connections through all the trophic levels, through one gut to another, including when we die. There are water patterns; harvest patterns. There are spatial patterns where the grassland edges to woodland, which edges to wetland, and then to a stream, each vegetation cover with polycultural patterns of their own.
There are economic patterns where the profitable pasture in one area turns to the unprofitable in another. There are multiple values where the woodland gully is both profitable and protecting; where ecological diversity is an economic benefit, and the wetland a giver of biodiversity, water regulation, recreation, stock health and more.
There are temporal patterns seasonal and through disturbance big and small. There are thresholds of change, feedbacks, synergies where building diversity and pattern begets improved function begets social, environmental and economic benefits.
Those patterns move far beyond the biophysical function and health of the any landscape. They impact on humanity in so many ways, both social and economic. That is the great shame in looking at land as a factory. The technocrat focused on one thing is more than likely disconnected from the good life, certainly from the rural sociology of degrading communities and the real price decline of commodities. The solutions lie in the reimagining. A healthy landscape can create free ecosystem gifts and reduced costs, as well as a marketing narrative and a price premium. A functioning landscape can create diversity of enterprise because there is kai moana, the pheasants and birdsong have returned, and the landscape is beautiful on a horse. The emergence of the something new.
By being told to keep to our discipline, and ignore the context of life itself, we both turn away from seeing and thinking about potential, and unwittingly degrade not just that potential, but what we have. Taken to a place where there is no understanding of broader context, then analysis alone creates yet more dysfunction. It destroys the connections and the functions it cannot see outside its own analytical bubble. It imagines this discipline competing with that one over there; a necessary trade-off rather than a potential synergy. The economist competes with the environmental scientist, ignoring and degrading the very basis of the economy. The pastoralist may treat soils, wetlands and the woodlands as things to ‘improve’ in their own factory-orientated way, ignoring and degrading the very basis of a resilient farm system.
So here is a direct reimagining challenge to my professional colleagues. It is all right to care and to love. No parent looks at a child ‘objectively’, and no one would suggest that such a view would make a parent wiser; it’s the very opposite. And nor ought we look at our landscapes that way. Our analytical tradition of the last few hundred years in the West is but a tool in gaining some aspects of knowledge, but it is not the essence of knowing. Focus on patterns, functions, ripple effects and connections, including your own.
There are solutions to the decline in our landscapes, and the people and economies they support, that run far deeper than the endless treadmill of techno-fixes presupposing landscapes as machines. We need to become wise again, and part of that involves re-embracing connection, and what it is to belong. Embrace the personal. Hell, celebrate it! Dare to write a technical paper and mention the word beauty.
New Zealand Podocarp Hardwood forest. Photo: Spencer Clubb
So here is something personal. Our life creates the lens through which we presume to ‘objectively’ see. I grew up on land, caught cockabullies and koura in the creek, threw dead lambs into the wetlands to watch the eels come, lambed my first ewe when I was only four, knew the cold places from the warm places, knew when to avoid the magpie trees. I wanted to study forest ecology because I loved Ball’s Clearing as a child, a Podocarp Hardwood remnant sitting beneath the Kaweka Range in Hawke’s Bay. The experience of that place was all the motivation I needed. The sounds of wind in the canopy, boughs creaking, birds singing; diversity in pattern, colour and light. The grandeur and beauty of height and dance. The smell – almost the taste – of the air. The overwhelming sense of something being alive; something being literally wonder-ful.
And then I went to university and learned many things about ecological function and links to society and economy, but I had to hold those memories within because I was not taught about the patterns of light and the smell. Perhaps you cannot teach an appreciation of art and beauty. Or can you? You can at least acknowledge it.
Here is the nub. Our disconnected and mechanical view of landscapes in New Zealand that reduces irregular complexity to measured and homogenous regularity has led to the continued degradation of those landscapes. Along with that degradation we have lost values vital to community and local economies for the short-term benefit of a few who do not even seek a life in that place.
A reimagined view of our landscapes can do the opposite; create multiple beneficial 
functions; take the Gestalt and make it both. We can restore environmental, social and economic health to place. We can recreate the functions of water regulation to mitigate or avoid droughts and downstream floods. We can improve aquatic ecological systems and water quality. We can reduce the boom/bust cycle of feeder streams. We can improve biodiversity and with it the economic and social values biodiversity gifts to us all. We can increase input/output productivity, even increase the great god gross production, while reducing energy inputs and building deeply functional carbon banks, and reduce greenhouse gases. We can increase the quality of produce and reverse real price decline. We can improve the economy and resilience of farmscapes to the irregular events of climatic extremes and market shifts.
And when we do it from a reimagined worldview, there need to be no trade-off between the land, community and enterprise; just synergies.
So why hasn’t it happened yet? Because the Modern ideas that dominate the minds of those who consider themselves ‘objective’ are the wrong ideas. Those ideas, oh so ironically considered ‘objective’ and value-free, are deeply embedded within the culture of New Zealand land use.
Wendell Berry was right to frame the crisis in American agriculture as “a crisis of culture.” New Zealand is no different. Unfortunately, the culture has shifted from one mode – the Modernity of Colonial thought – to another not dissimilar mode, the Modernity of Corporate Agribusiness. Both have an interest in mechanical and homogeneous production systems (factories); cost-efficiency through scale rather than building free ecological gifts, value or diverse resilience; increasing production and throughput of a commodity; cheap ‘resources’; and the viewing of both people and landscapes as sets of those ‘resources to utilise’, rather than ‘potential to realise’.
Both impose those subjective reducible factory beliefs on our landscapes with the justification of supposedly ‘objectively’ measured reports.
We need to decolonise and decorporatise our minds before we can decolonise our landscapes. That is where the problems lie deep. Changing that mythology of machine, reimagining that, is where the solutions lie, hidden from sight.
Chris Perley
Thoughtscapes
Reimagining Landscapes II: The Biophysical Agroecological Argument
Reimagining Landscapes III: The Resilience Argument
Reimagining Landscapes IV: The Microsite Economic Argument
Reimagining Landscapes V: The Market Narrative Argument
Reimagining Landscapes VI: Rebuilding Decentralised Knowledge and Value Systems
Reimagining Landscapes VII: Breaking the Policy-Education-Research-Agribusiness Nexus
Chris Perley has a background in the field, in management, policy, consulting and research relating to land use, the environment, rural economies and communities. He is an affiliated researcher at Otago University’s Centre for Sustainability.
feed on the ridges and valleys. I’ve seen the gorse come back, and seen the helicopters fly to douse it again with chemicals to clear it once more – because there is a god called grass … and then again …
dominance of that integral experience of flux; the dominance of diverse pattern and interrelation creating something new with each step and breath; the difference in the combinations of things and which one drives the system – on this day, in this hour, in this patch.
inquiry into the public service in 2014? Low morale and the fear culture which gets in the way of “free and frank advice without fear or favour” were some of the issues. There were no surprises in Palmer’s comments for me. I wrote this blog for The Daily Blog in Winter 2014, herewith very slightly edited. Nothing has improved. The underlying ideas are still prevalent. And now we have Trump, whose own fear, and that fear he creates, corrupts.
the new concepts through which we ought to determine policy: rational choice theory; a world ruled by personal gain, not a sense of community and individual purpose; a world in which all interactions are essentially transactional market exchanges – such as selling my obedient labour for your desired outputs – a focus on ‘resources’ and things, not people and purpose.
She thought that the situation is made worse by our change in focus within ‘education’ toward mechanical principles of measured standards, obedience, and dealing at the level of outputs rather than values. She argued that, at least in the Anglo-American world, changes to our education systems are reducing our capacity to make change prior to an irrefutable – and potentially disastrous – wake-up call. The mechanical technocrats have raised ‘credentialing’ (whether as ‘standards’ or degrees) above education’s purpose to further the capacity in our people to see, create, engage, dialogue and think. They replace the culture of society with the machine.
effectiveness’; all cliché-laden Orwellian Newspeak non-thought Big Bertha PR leaflet barrages that seem highly meaningful to those that just love the metre and rhythm of 10-second sound bites. I’m unconvinced he believed any of it, but loyalty runs deep.![dilbert-bingo[1]](https://i0.wp.com/chrisperleyblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/dilbert-bingo1.gif?resize=400%2C121&ssl=1)
; similar to when someone mentions ‘trickle down’. Stan’s cliché de jour – now so hackneyed that only those with robot-like Don Brash artificial intelligence do not smile – demonstrates a faith. Treasury and the State Services Commission – and Stan was then Minister of State Services – believed truly that a corporate-style dictatorship staffed by people who know less and less about any specific field – whether education, health, or innovation – would create better outcomes by focusing on quantitative outputs, performance measures, obedience and rigid annual project plans.
our stories of how we see the world – and why – and to expose in the light what lies deep beneath any position – examined or otherwise.
above the wisdom of intimacy and connection.
tadpole pond destroyed (rationally) in pursuit of something called progress. What do those people know about the feeling you get when you come out covered in duckweed with an Agee jar filled with tadpoles, or when you lie still in a podocarp-hardwood forest? Isn’t that feeling part of the search for truth as well?
function of the mixed farms of inland Canterbury – were pointed at by an agronomy professor while chanting an empty and highly ignorant cliché, “a waste of good land.” I felt as though he looked at me with a withering eye. It was downhill from there.
economists that would benefit from seeing the world as a constantly dynamic, adaptive and complex ecosystem rather than some Modern Cartesian dream of the machine. I’ve been trying to climb off the damn thing ever since. But the machines are everywhere, welcoming you to the cubical and the assigned marching order of what some call a life.
This approach to analysis represents a disconnect between economic, social and environmental futures by either choice or by resigned acceptance of a false philosophical view as truth; one that sees only a land of averages, without variation, or pattern, or connection. Talk about the loss of opportunity because of the unexamined assumptions of narrow technocrats! Talk about the inevitable reduction in resilience and the actual increase in uncertainty by building a system that presumes regularity!
uniform industrial model of land. Production and feed utilisation varies with site. Costs do not spread evenly over the landscape; 80:20 principles hold often where most costs of this or that relate to a smaller proportion of the land. Eighty percent of woody weed control may occur on 20 percent of areas – usually gullies where the stock do not like to go. We were neither taught to look for those patterns, nor to work within them, and so we worked against them.
potential to strike a chord or create a harmony; low production areas combine with high cost, low returns on investment, better suitability for woodland or wetland compared to pasture, and high environmental sensitivity. These areas combining negatives represent both financial and functional black holes when kept in pasture.
The real demise for H. sapiens happened after some idiot savants thought the whole of existence could be conceptualised as an atomised machine around 1600 years after the birth of a man who actually tried to point out some truths in direct contradiction to ordering life by hierarchy and machine (which was then completely turned on its head by something called “the Church” …. see “Religious Cults – Earth”). Irony again. Irony is important for an understanding of H. sapiens.
Madness was, of necessity, redefined. Those who noticed too much under the new order, were ‘mad’. Those who didn’t notice anything at all besides dollars that didn’t exist in any real sense, were ‘sane’.
By contrast, what was meant by, for instance ….. experiencing the soft fall of snowflakes on your cheek, holding and squeezing the warm hands of someone dear with which to share, wreathed in a smile, listening to the sound of a descending rainbow with a warbler accompaniment, beside an outdoor crackling log fire …. was …. precisely …. zero.
And so the consequences rolled one to another to another. The consequence of that delusion of misplaced concreteness by only noticing numbers that stay still and behave was the inevitable destruction of planetary functions – which are not numbers but contingent verbs – necessary for human life (let alone meaning). The consequences also weren’t too crash hot for anyone who happened to live with the apparently deluded belief that they lived in a community, and thought it remotely reasonable to look at rainbows in the arms of a lover lying beside a log fire.
landscapes. He sees patterns in that place where people and landscapes meet. He takes to task what we mean by Progress, and the need to change our thinking. There are principles we need to think about; the impossibility of continued material growth; the dangers of increased energy consumption; the life-giving potential of self-organised systems (our bodies are one, a forest ecosystem another). Tom argues that the over-simplification of our life through eyes that focus only on numbers and scale ‘efficiencies’, are pushing us away from life toward a dystopian machine that will inevitably eat itself.
Bryson spurns the measures of wealth. GDP tells us very little about quality of life, our opportunities, our hopes, our dreams, the capacities within our landscapes and communities we lose at future peril. He points instead to the quality of things that those peering into spreadsheets will never see, and so will destroy without realising their own wilful ignorance. Those who cannot connect blindly destroy the things that make us belong. Usually because they cannot measure them.
other books, everything changes on the surface. Stasis is a myth. Building and trees fall and regenerate; in life, everything grows and dies and is replaced. This is the inherent creativity of not just ecological but social life. But what lies beneath is what is really important; the capacities that keep this dynamic wheel called life revolving. If we do not re-embrace as the basis of governance those capacities that give life, then it isn’t governance, it is a clearance sale.
qualitative capacities that drive it, then you will treat people and the land as resources to grind. And when you have ground them down, with them will go those social and environmental capacities upon which we depend: love, foresight, creativity, hope, trust, community-centred morality, belonging; the landscape’s capacity to mitigate flood and drought, climatic extreme, the capacities of growth and renewal.
belong to a place.
Of course, only governments should be small; everything else can get as big as it wants and is entirely to do with private ‘merit’; big business, big banks, big private media. Why do we keep believing them?
bonds, trust, belonging, hope, connections, community and local democracy participation, the free creation of art and spontaneity of laughter, a sense of equity and 
opportunity, serendipitous meeting places, dialogic fora, cavorting with nature and dancing in the thunderstorm – all the things that make life worthwhile – have led to better economic outcomes.
favour power, who then use power to take more, thus increasing power, thus increasing the take … until …… bang.
slice of humanity (do Treasury analysts read history or novels?), a connection to the shifting beauty of the planet (do currency traders wander the hills and smell the roses?), and a sense of what is ethical beyond the utilitarian calculations that says if there is money to be made, then it is right (do neoliberals free expensive caged birds?)
life – are their raison d’etre. The fact that we look for the duality is the first problem. STEM thinks itself above the arts, and yet you cannot see, nor create, nor wisely judge without it. STEM to STEAM.
Neither pre-modern, nor modern, but a Third Way.
Science also has to see its place within a moral policy-making world, and within a wider knowledge system. Once you see yourself as influenced by social context, you can judge what suits a science that advances our commonwealth of knowledge, and contrast that with a science that serves the interests of private power and a dominant idea.
There is a reason why many feel that short-term commercial imperatives are the corrupter of science. Tobacco industry science. And that is but one example of a normative influence.
We have presumed that objectifying leads us to truth. Curiously this is a metaphysical belief; no ‘objective’ truth. It is no position that can be tested using the analytical traditions … because the analytical tradition itself starts with the very assumption we ought to question …… It assumes objectivity as a virtue. And you cannot objectively analyse a virtue.
Perhaps this is why the writings of Hannah Arendt are increasing in popularity. Arendt wrote so well about The Origins of Totalitarianism as well as the psychology of unthinking and blindly obedient functionaries like Adolph Eichmann. A recent article in The Conversation, 
Resilient lands require capacities to cope and adapt – think of flood and drought, cost rises and price falls, the sudden unavailability of one thing around which you may have built your world. Think of building the self-organised functional integrity of a social and ecological space. Never think of life as a sausage machine, measured ‘resources’ on assembly lines.
because they relate to contingent and conditional shifting things, not just in the biophysical space of landscapes, but also in the psyche and sociology of sentient beings. Create hope, and you do many things. Lose hope and you do many things.
on reductionist and measurable STEM subjects, or more connection to the wider realities of this context, here and now?
They mean provide the numbers – all immeasurables being non-existent apparently – while the strategist may have talked of all these linkages in logical, qualitative and contingent ways.
intellectual statement. Thought is not just about numbers. Thought is not just about focusing on the dynamics of a small number of variables – and only the convenient regular ones at that.
and uncertain world. They certainly cannot get the potential of designing self-organised resilient complex systems. They take a flower and dissect it into material, disenchanted and disconnected measured cogs.
was a technofix, not a system redesign. I declined it not because I could predict exactly what would happen – DCD in the milk – but because I suspected something *would* happen – another advance on the treadmill of symptoms (“what else have you done?”) – and the underlying dysfunction and dis-integration of the base landscape system would not be solved. No, let’s research in order to sell something, not solve something. I had no evidence of specific concerns – I did not know the outcome – but from within a systems view the research screamed mechanical myopia, which cried consequence.
accounts?). Or that losing your soil, water, biodiversity, etc. is not a long-term viable business model (I can always buy more N and PKE, eh – and there is no effect other than more grass growth and feed, right?). Or that repressing people is entirely divorced from social revolutions (they are there to serve me, they should feel privileged). Or that leaving it to ‘the Lord Market’ will somehow always self-regulate to some future utopia – like a nice predictable controllable machine.
that hold water are integral to so much else, so many other environmental, economic and social issues. Water holding is one of those classic ‘sites of action’ that ripple out in positive waves from that pebble we throw in the pond of conventional, still and immutable ideas.
I have a question … well, two. First one. Do we make room for creativity anymore – for the synthesisers?
B-grader’s motivation is self and control rather than outcome. And then the C-graders hire the D-graders ……. ad absurdum.
world of uncertainty and surprise, which might suggest we think about resilience and building human and environmental capacities and functions that allow us to cope with the irregular; you know, a few future bumps? We don’t deal in silly conceptual queries. Just do as you’re told. 
behind the States. And the decay is already well advanced. Why don’t the leaders try to understand it, rather than enthusiastically call for one and all to put the hammer down – more dams, GM Food, more N, technofixes, get bigger, a bigger mill, reduced water quality standards, the right to exploit workers ….. ?
wee counting instrrrument therre laddie, but rreally ken”) – you need intimacy – an intimate relationship with a thing, a space where you lose yourself in being at one with the new whole that is you and that thing (the actor, the act, and the stage)- without one reference at all to an explicit thought. You know and act, because you are wrapped up within and around that thing – the implicit dominates the explicit. You don’t 
think, you just feel and do, because you just know.
So much beauty. The chef who can bring tastes together in some new complex which a food technologist could never do with all their chemistry. The musicians creating something essentially indescribable outside of bearing witness to the experience. Or a man and a dog working a flock where one slow step to the right can make the whole thing change. You see it when a nurse or paramedic just act with a lightness of being, where intuition supplants the procedural rules. You see magic created not by the machine of ordered parts, but by the organic, feeling, intuitive thing. They have moved beyond the measures and procedures and manuals to another world where lies creativity and art.
or channelling, or whatever. But it’s real.
position of better knowing.
I’m curious about how we lose empathy – in self or as a whole culture – toward people, or life, or land. How we lose that sense that we are all connected, that we belong to each other. How do we lose the perspective of life as interdependent. I’m curious because Mother Teresa is right that without that sense of belonging we can have no peace. We fight a war with ourselves.
people as ‘things’, it rings true. I’m curious because I was trained to think and analyse as a technocrat of ‘resources’: the ultimate ‘things’ outside ourselves.
mind the measured projections have the illusion of being tangible – “
If they are outside, then of course not. Never mind the parable of the good Samaritan (the point being that he was an other, so empathise with others). When it comes to how we apply the Golden Rule, we like to make exceptions. We like to call some people infidel; unbelievers; other. AKA things. It gives us an excuse to abuse and still feel we have right and are right.
disintegrations; reductions and rejections of anything that does not sit still long enough to be measured. Our current fetish is for seeing the world even more as silos of us and other with all the incumbent blinkers of within the box thinking.
They see no irony there. The wisdom of the Humanities and the Arts that seek truth in ways other than through numbers are treated as infidel by the STEM technocracies. Do a STEM subject, the policy makers say, get paid more relative to those unbelievers. We are so much in competition that we feel the need to label ourselves, so that we can position, again. I’m frankly sick of spreadsheets and models. I know how often they are misapplied, what contexts they deride, in whose status quo interests they lie, and what crap they hide.
Ivan Dickinson from Clover Land Apiaries in Milton once told me that gorse is the vital early season provider of protein-rich pollen. And it keeps producing pollen right through to autumn. Where there isn’t gorse handy, the beekeepers sometimes have to supplement the hives. Alas, no honey to speak of. A bit of a dry well there.
were actively underplanting their gorse with natives as an alternative to the match and the bulldozer.
The argument for GM Food is supported by those taking a number of positions: 1. That GM will increase food production and we need to feed the world (false on both counts); 2. that GM will provide business opportunities for our local farmers (false, though it is true of the owners of GM patents); and 3. that we ought to trust the science and technology of GM, and fear of eating GM food is merely the ignorance of the masses that will soon be put to rest by even more science (supercilious, and false).
Daryl Petersen obviously believes that GM food production is merely a technological tool whose science is secure, and eventually the people will all wake up and mature to his higher level of knowing. For the benefit of those that think like Mr Petersen, there are actually four arguments against GM.
publish, but present horror stories. And then look at the concerted attacks on those that do publish within the loopholes of the veto rights.
You need to feel the land again, to hear it say kiaora as you sale on the winding paths, swoops and zooms and leaning banks and diving turns of New Zealand hill country roads – the nearest thing to flying on wheels. You wind the window down, push every bar on your sense equaliser to the extremes, turn Pink up, feel the poems come into your head, and scream into the wind.
I’ve been reading David James Duncan’s The River Why. The movie does absolutely no justice to this book. I suppose big philosophy books like Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, or Catch 22, will always struggle to get the questions and arguments across in a two hour movie.
he bounty becomes a ‘thing’.
reverence, be grateful to the earth and the spirits, and from a practical sense improve resilience and cover the contingencies by focusing on diversity of food type and source, and by a strategy of minimising the minimum – reduce the possibility and the degree of that killer famine year. What have we done in the West in our Modern age? By focusing on maximising the maximum – often of a single and hugely problematic KPI measure of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) – we have emphasised the possibility of the worst of bad results at the other extreme. Resilience to shocks is not a dominant feature of modern policy making, though the use the word more and more with absolutely no comprehension of what a shift in thinking resilience represents.
out the lessons of the past, and the fact that Spirit Father will have the last word. He tells a story of when his own people lost reverence for the world; a reverence that is lost now in our technocratic world ….. “Then it was the river of fire. Now it is the white man’s dam. These are the Spirit Father’s weapons. Always it is the same: it is the greedy, the cruel, the ungrateful that bring about suffering upon the people.”
Know that there are root things (ideas especially) that make the proximate things – the symptoms – happen. Know that any solutions must dig deep into those roots, and that the worst thing to do is blindly fiddle with the symptoms – the surface things (more crime? Build prisons! More poverty? Benefit cuts to create ‘incentive’ and tax cuts for the rich (to encourage speculation?)! , etc.), and add ad hoc epicycles to your pet theories to try and justify a suite of false ideas.
positions. They haven’t even thought of them, because their lens is the model, not history. Their lens is a suite of false assumptions about the nature of our natural systems, and our communities, and of the difference between meritocracy and power. Their lens is completely oblivious to the short-term and narrow nature of unwise commerce.
the mathematics of a myth of powerlessness.
European colonisation of our very own country. Today the agents are powerful nation states supporting their mega-corporates. The same corporates that (I will never say ‘who’ – they are not people) fund their politicians so the game of taking where and when they can, keeps working for them.
within a colony. It is made worse by being a classic ‘extractive economy’, a contrast to ‘creative economies’ that thrive on a base of human ingenuity and enterprise. Extractive economies only last while the ‘resources’ being mined are economic to extract – including those slow-cycling natural systems like forests, fisheries, soil and water.
Extractive economies are doomed, like Nauru. Where are the people of Nauru now? Where are the fishing villages that used to fish the Grand Banks cod? Where are the fishers of Somalia, who resorted to pirating because their seas were ravaged by outsiders?
The first imperative is avoid being a colony. Retain value in our region. Avoid the loud sucking sound as profits, expenditure, interest and lost opportunity for local value chains drains away. If there is any sucking sound to be had, make it in our direction.
and avoid an extractive one. Extractive economies attract the worst of ‘investors’; those who want things – labour or resource – cheap or free. They follow the creed of the coloniser Cecil Rhodes – cheap resources and labour, and never mind the slag heaps left behind. Those on the look out for cheap Orcs and the land of Mordor. Those who do not care about community or place.
because hope is vital to creativity.
well, because a local economy thrives when people spend locally. Build John Kenneth Galbraith’s ‘thick’ economy where the commonwealth is not a thin stick with all the money at the top, but spread. His Affluent Society. Treasury and right-wing politicians don’t understand this either, convinced as they are that money flows to where it is deserved.
We live in a province, often bombarded by the rhetoric of those who would do the very opposite of Retain, Create, Multiply, Distribute and Attract. They argue for making our home an extractive economy, owned by outsiders, populated by poorly paid people in a crumbling environment. That suits them, not us.
We used to live in tribal common lands – in much of Europe as well as in Aotearoa; in land referred to by the pronoun ‘thou’ not ‘it’, as mother, as a sentient being to which we belong and which requires reciprocal care as she cares for us – Papatūānuku.
Hearing a Māori Kaumatua talking about land as something which we cannot own but which owns us, rocked me two decades ago. Then you read Hone Tuwhare writing about the love for, and from, Papatūānuku.
All the work on 
Aristotle wrote that in order to make the right decision you have to have a concept of virtue and vice, and the practical wisdom (Phronesis) that gives you the broader perspective of this particular challenge, in this particular time and place. He was essentially arguing for a knowledge system similar to these above. 
nutrient gruel to make them into obedient cogs for the machine. All those qualitative things like love, the potential of imagination, touch, belonging, worth, spontaneous spirit, creativity, community, consciousness, soul, and life’s meaning are considered ‘unscientific’. Numbers trump values. Meaning is reduced to a delusion of value-free ‘objectivity’ by the state or the corporation. Consider the Picassos we turn into lever pullers, the Mozarts into button pushers. The psychopaths we mold.
as a much loved playground to which we belonged.
Enough with all the mechanical in-the-box thinking. It is leading us in a vicious treadmill downwards. This is not a time for defending some cherished ‘tradition’ of land use; it is a time to start thinking conceptually and strategically. How can we create a better landscape that provides multiple benefits for all, and puts us in the best position for an inevitably uncertain future, whether climatic, financial or social?
And then the inevitable tragedy plays out. We watch as the dominant buyers say thanks very much, we’ll now drop the price by your cost-efficiency. The price reduction then kicks the narrow technocratic myopia into gear – led often by the so-called leaders within policy, education and research. They didn’t pause to think because they are too busy measuring yield, and that is what they do.
economies of scale. Plant uneconomic grass on the perfect site for a Grand Cru vineyard. Be forced to employ less people, and make them migrants on lower wages. Spend less locally. Push ever more costs onto the downstream community (“they ought to pay us for the right to swim really”), or into our own future by degrading the capacities of the land into the machine – a hydroponic factory of nutrients and water. Who needs soil anyway? Look forward to Monsanto’s next GM saviour wonder plant.
Position over production, every time. Else we will continue to spiral down. This is strategy, not technofix laid upon technofix laid upon the bankers’ dream of the industrial scale dam to produce yet more adjective-less dross – whose price will certainly fall, perpetuating the treadmill.
I was going to write something about how to create a better economy … and society … and culture … and environment – because they all go together, because they are all connected, and you cannot know, understand or make wise decisions relating to them without understanding the interconnections (eco – ‘nomists’ note for heaven’s sake).
We need that sense of belonging, of connection.
wisely. Get this. Authorities are almost never wise. Work on yourself and your community. There lies the future.
economic – create Tuscany, not Nebraska Inc. where the corporate model turns people into the voters of Trump – a glimmer of hope for those too busy struggling to think. Create the flowers that attract. Don’t bother measuring the scent. Just sense it.
Sauron, and you are looking for some cheap Orcs, or a Shire to ravage, or an Ent Forest to destroy.
critiqued. And I read Robert Pirsig, and he wrote …..
view of what some dare to call – life. The mechanical dogma of material mathematical reductionism to cogs and wheels is not life. It is a zombie existence.
Yesterday, a Monday, I saw my first Red Admiral since a day in April 2015. You will say I am not observant. I would say I am …. at least for land and the things in the scape of land.
who manifest as power-hungry mega-corporates. But the people are ultimately in charge, with – if we choose – the power to resist them, and to control them, or even eradicate them. Behave, or be gone.
from which you are inseparable and on which you depend, that will colour your judgments and actions. If you are taught reverence for something bigger than yourself as a virtue, you will tend not to act with the hubris of a despot. If you are raised with love and self-esteem, you will tend not to feel the need to continually justify yourself by personal aggrandisement and putting yourself above others, or others down.
popping CDs into the player they way you always did. What’s going on? But the quotes and the musings are part of who I am, and they go back years. You never really stop looking at the world, and wondering. 
someone had spoken to me about how beauty in Maori metaphysics – like kaitaikitanga – goes both ways; centred around wholeness and connection. Kaitiakitanga is not paternal ‘stewardship’, as so often translated, because that suggests you are an objective observer, outside the world and “looking after it.” It sets up a hierarchy when there isn’t one there because harm to it is harm to yourself. Stewardship suggests whatever happens won’t impact on you. You are being benevolent, from a position above, 
and you are doing all the impacting on ‘it’ – this impersonal ‘thing’, inert and without soul. 
interlocked spiral perhaps – call it a helix if you want. We and the planet are intwined (twins), knotted together, as we are with a far greater oneness, somewhere, out there. The Maori koru as unfolding life, rebirth, a deeper connection to the earth, as potential and hope. That symbol – 
like the knot – is everywhere in indigenous thinking; Western as well, from the pagans through to today. 
beautiful – complete, perfect, whole. Doing the opposite does the opposite to us all. 
nouns of the world – but in actions and functions – the verbs of creating a form, having gratitude, hospitality and grace, the way we move in a dance with the world and each other. Twining the spirals. We are how we act and be, what we create that sings to others, 
or what we destroy like Dorian Gray. We are not what we have, or mere outside appearance. 
got that theme I drum on about of a world defined far more by relationships, adverbs and verbs than analytical nouns and adjectives.
yet we laud that process as some form of higher, professional, academic ‘better’ knowing. But a thing is never a thing in and of itself. You have to think like the god Janus, who looks both ways – down to the parts, and up to the whole. Both give meaning. Context really does matter. Context beyond the measured things. Arthur Koestler taught us that much – things are Holons, both parts and wholes whose boundaries are defined by the mind’s eye, or perhaps something from beneath and beyond.
Don’t look for rigid, universal order; look for the dance within life. But there is yet more than even that. A depth to the world that goes far beyond the material.
symptoms and never the root cause. They work on the surface of things and are not wise.
count, resonant with emotion? Why?
Does it matter? Are we just material stuff, cogs connected by wheels grinding forward without purpose? Is that how we best know the world? Is that how we best manage our world. Because this is the Anthem of our Age – measuring the marigolds, inch by inch, without stopping to observe their beauty.
level where rational models justifying the insane have absolutely not place. We who know history; can describe the horrors of the machine, especially when ego, delusion, power and blind unthinking functionaries combine – none of which they include in the models. We have read the wisdom of the great classics, from Moby Dick to Frankenstein; the rationalised functioning without any deeper sense of the whole – insanity.
We can focus on synthesis – looking at things as a whole as well as parts – as essential to knowing. To get away with our academic obsession with always breaking things up into ever-more isolated bits and then putting some numbers on it with complex mathematics to shroud the illusion. But it isn’t enough. It is still presenting the world behind a magician’s cape, it is still not much more than clever representation and the thrill of mystery to give a sense of something real.
extraordinary step of believing in both our narrow technocrats *and* their tricks.
requires some base of perennial philosophies such as doing unto others – others including our community and the planet of which we are a part, and on which we all depend.
everywhere. Stability comes from dancing through the inevitable disturbance. Functional integrity comes from a position of accepting change and maintaining the capacity to renew, and renew, and renew again.
Tom Wessels writes beautifully about how to read the landscapes of change around us. And the change and diversity and surprise and unpredictability is a beautiful thing. It creates chaos and beauty, mystery and dance. Better that than the ordering of marching lines, following some idiot over the edge of the next abyss.
And yet we live and think within a false materialist and reductionist view as if the world in all its complexity – its geology, meteorology, ecology and sociology, to name a few – is better represented by some metaphor of a certain and controllable machine.
sociologists. They better understand the home within which we live because the systems they observe are so defined by change and thresholds you can only examine after the event. They understand the ‘eco’, the home. The public health professional responding to the outbreak which came from who knows where. The educationalists who know that a child can go many ways in life, irreducible to nonsense assumption of ‘rational choice’ and educational achievement of some rigid and baseless standard. He can count, so he should be ok then. They want to build capacities in children to live in a society and a world. The government think you do that by building obedience and standardised order.
