Is civilisational collapse anything to be scared of? My talks in New York this next week are about design for life after the industrial growth economy. I hope to see some of you there.

THE AGE OF "OOPS!" - DESIGN IN A GIFT ECONOMY
Jobs and money are in short supply - probably for ever. Are there ways that design can add new value to sharing, bartering, lending, trading, renting, gifting, exchanging, & swapping? Monday 30 January, 6pm, Higgins Hall, Brooklyn campus of Pratt Institute

BROWN BAG at STUDIO X
Are green roofs and cool-looking wind turbines the go-faster stripes of 'green' architecture? Bring a brown bag because I'll be talking about catabolic collapse at my lunchtime chat at Studio X the New York hub of GSAPP’s (look it up) global network of advanced research laboratories for exploring the future of cities. Tuesday January 31, noonish-1:30pm 180 Varick St, NYC Map

HARD HATS at SVA
Allan Chochinov must be expecting aggro because we all have to wear hard hats to this "at home" session on the occasion of his new masters programme Products of Design. Thursday 02 February 7-9pm, SVA, 136 West 21 Street, NYC

This, I kid you not, is the "control" panel in my room at the Inn at Penn here in Philadelphia.

I'm sorry the pictures here are a bit blurred, but I'm not in tip top shape. What happened is that I woke up a 3am gasping for air - only to discover that that you can't open the window. You can stare at a curtain-rail-that-is-not-a-curtain-rail (below) - but doing that does not increase the supply of oxygen

Ok, I thought, so I can't have air - what about water? I strode purposefully to bathroom to turn on the light.

Now in pre-modern times, there would have been an on-off switch on the wall by the door. But these being Evolved times, I had to fumble around inside the (dark) bathroom in order to locate this second control panel. It's conveniently located just below groin height right next to the electrical socket; you turn on the light by sticking your finger onto one of the buttons....

I stared for some time at the menu of options. The first item on the menu is "Vanity". I have enough of that already, so I settled for item 4, "On".

They say that dehydration contributes to dementia, so my judgment may by now have been impaired. But I decided to go online and catch up on my mail.

Bad. Idea.

Now I'm not easily rattled, but by this time I needed coffee. So I decided to call room service using the iPad interface. (Yes, I know, the words "He" "Never" and "Learns" spring to mind). Anyway, instead of a cup-of-coffee icon I could press, this nightmare geezer appeared.

He babbled on about my "Interactive Customer Experience" - or ICE, as it's called. "To begin your experience, touch the screen" he then said. Now I'm not sure that my forceful motoric action at this point was strictly-speaking a 'touch' - but it did the trick: My nemesis disappeared.

A rational response to this tech insanity would have been for me run naked down to reception and start screaming at the duty manager. What in fact happened was a kind of high-tech Stockholm Syndrome. I stared stare at "Evolve > Off" and wondered when it was, exactly, that *I* had gone mad.

I did not realise, I swear, that my talk in New York next week, which is about design in a gift economy, will coincide with the city's huge 35,000 visitor International Gift Fair. Someone out there in gift-land is on is on the marketing ball, because they sent me an email the day after my talk was announced.

Perplexed, I risked a peek at the Gift Fair site. Bad idea. The ground fell away. I felt like one of those astronauts, cast adrift in space, floating helplessly away from the mother ship.

The gift fair website took me into a parallel universe that contains the chick-a-dee designer smoke alarm (shown in the photo above). The designer smoke alarm led on to a pink designer shopping cart that someone had left in a laundrette. And that led to the upside down plant pots below...

These "evolved gardening design" artefacts, I was told, will "purify the air, conserve water, and transform your view of nature".

Of course they will. In fact, I'm very keen to introduce the upside-down nature team to my own advisor on all things natural; he's shown in the image below:

The talk next Monday, it seems, has become a contest between two different meanings of the word "gift". There's the kind that you pay for, and that will transform your view of nature. And there's the kind that you don't pay for which is what i thought everyone meant by a gift economy until received the email about the chicken.

My starting point is this (I quote from the Pratt Institute website): "Jobs and money are in short supply — probably for ever. Are there ways that design can add new value to sharing, bartering, lending, trading, renting, gifting, exchanging & swapping?".

Could there be a win-win space that unites us? Come next Monday, and we'll find out.

Apartment for sale

I've seen this Virtual Boarding Agent a couple of times now at Orly Airport in Paris. A It's a life-sized, life-like, two dimensional human figure that talks pleasantly about liquids and gels. It's spooky, clever, and very well executed - and most people seem to ignore it after a first casual glance.

I therefore feel sorry for its designers, and for the airport managers who deployed it. Billed without too much exaggeration as a "futuristic travel experience", it must have taken an age to develop, and cannot be cheap. But the traveling public appear to be so saturated with input that this mini-marvel barely grabs their attention.

Once, when my flight was delayed, and I spent half an hour watching the thing, I daydreamed that this could be the teleconferencing toy - sorry, tool - I've been looking for. I'm desperate to replace my shameful flying for work with virtual talks and workshop - but the transition is proving slower than I had hoped. It occurred to me that perhaps a holographic JT, plonked onto the podium at the allotted hour, might be an acceptable substitute.

Then, as I observed how underwhelmed were the Orly passers-by, my optimism waned. Tensator, who made the creature, seem also to have modest ambitions; they describe their fabricated life-form as a "next generation digital signage solution" and "a unique advertising and instructional platform to convey your brand messaging".

I've explored the subject of telepresence - and why, for the most part, it sucks - in numerous marvelous papers. I'm stuck. Even though the first videophone was launched with much kerfuffle back in 1964 (at the New York World's Fair) it seems that technology simply cannot and will not recreate what it is like to be in a meeting with people somewhere else. People seem to want to breathe the same air, and that's it.

And yet, and yet. The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote about kissing the picture of one's beloved. "When we kiss a photograph, we do not expect to conjure up a spectacular manifestation of the person in the picture represents—but the action is nonetheless satisfying.” So: who will be the first to invite me to give a talk - and be happy when I send a family snapshot to represent me?

1. TOM MURPHY - DO THE MATH
If you suspect, but cannot prove, that modern life simply does not add up, you'll love Tom Murphy's work. "My focus, as a physicist, is to understand whether the impossibility of indefinite physical growth (i.e. in energy, food, manufacturing) means that economic growth in general is also fated to end or reverse" explains this University of California professor. His writing is full of dry but stunning asides: "If you object that exponentials are unrealistic, then we’re in agreement. But such growth is the foundation of our current economic system, so we need to explore the consequences"; or, "The artificial world that must be envisioned to keep economic growth alive in the face of physical limits strikes me as preposterous and untenable" He remains perplexed by our collective blindness to a simple fact: It takes energy to obtain energy - the very commodity that is in short supply. He concludes in a matter-of-fact way: "Global transportation means pushing through air or water over vast distances that will not shrink. Cooking means heating meal-sized portions of food and water. (and so on). Can all of these things be done more efficiently? Absolutely. Can (these efficiency gains) go on forever to maintain growth? No." These three texts go together:
Galactic Scale Energy
Can Economic Growth Last?
What Does Sustainability Mean?

2. HOWARD T ODUM - ENERGY, ECOLOGY, ECONOMICS
Howard T. Odum was an American ecologist known for his pioneering work on ecosystem ecology, and for his provocative proposals for additional laws of thermodynamics, informed by his work on general systems theory. He explained human economics using ecology and energy fundamentals. His 1974 “Energy, Ecology, & Economics” helps explain why consumption and expanding technologies have limits; A Prosperous Way Down, (2001, with his wife Elisabeth), proposes solutions. Odum’s energy economics begins with an understanding that energy provides the foundation for all life processes - but that all energy is not equal. As energy is transformed through an ecosystem, quantity decreases as concentration increases. Odum coined the word “emergy” to account for the variations of energy quality.
Energy, Ecology, & Economics

3. HERMAN DALY - STEADY STATE ECONOMY
Herman Daly, an American ecological economist, explains that "the reason so much debt was incurred is that we have had absurdly unrealistic expectations about growth. We never expected that growth itself would begin to cost us more than it was worth, making us poorer, not richer. But it did". And the only solution our economists, bankers, and politicians have come up with is more of the same! Could we not, Daly asks, at least take a short time-out to discuss the idea of a a steady-state economy?
Steady-state Economy

4. UGO BARDI - ENTROPY, PEAK OIL, AND STOIC PHILOSOPHY
"There are thermodynamic constraints to the system that we cannot dismiss - even though these limits may not appear in economics textbooks. The final result is collapse in one form or another. We cannot avoid it.". Ugo Bardi, who teaches physical chemistry at the University of Florence (and who alerted me to the Monti speech) is a stoic scientist: "What is collapse, after all? A collapse is just a period in which things are changing faster than usual". As perhaps only an Italian would do, he compares our civilisational plight to crashing a car into a wall: "maybe you can't avoid it, but if you wear seat belts and you have an airbag you'll be much better off. Even more important is to see the wall as soon as possible and start braking". Hmmm
Peak Oil Thermodynamics and Stoic Philosophy
Peak Civilization: The Fall of the Roman Empire

5. IVAN ILLICH - ENERGY AND EQUITY (1973)
"It has recently become fashionable to insist on an impending energy crisis". Energy & Equity was first published in Le Monde in early 1973. He continued: "This euphemistic term conceals a contradiction, and consecrates an illusion. It masks the contradiction implicit in the joint pursuit of equity and industrial growth. It safeguards the illusion that machine power can indefinitely take the place of man power".Yep, pretty much the whole story in a few lines.
Energy & Equity

6. JOHN MICHAEL GREER - HOW CIVILIZATIONS FALL: A THEORY OF CATABOLIC COLLAPSE
Our economy is in danger of 'catabolic collapse' because it depends on perpetually growing throughputs of energy and resources that are simply not going to be available. Greer lately writes as if this process is well under way. He describes a "growing sense of apprehension that it *can* go on—that the troubles currently pressing in on the industrial world could just keep on getting worse, day after day, year after year, for decades to come, following the same gradual curve that the industrial world followed in the days of its growth, but in reverse". Sounds about right. And so? (This will be the conclusion to my talk).
A Theory of Catabolic Collapse

7. JARED DIAMOND - COLLAPSE
"One reason societies fail is that their elites are insulated from the true energy costs of their society". We are not the first. Diamond focuses on Easter Island, where the overuse of wood products eventually destroyed its inhabitants' survival prospects. Do today's financial elites worry at night about about energy? If Mr Monti is any guide then, no, they jolly well do not.
Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail orSucceed

8. DAVID MACKAY - SUSTAINABLE ENERGY WITHOUT THE HOT AIR
This book is full of surprises, few of them pleasant. For example: turning off your phone charger for 24 hours saves as much energy as driving your car for...one second. MacKay was Professor of Natural Philosophy at the University of Cambridge until, last year, he became Chief Scientific Advisor to the UK's Department of Energy and Climate Change. The mind boggles at the thought of zero-attention-span pols being given this kind of reality-check: "How 'huge' are Britain's renewable resources, compared with its current (huge) energy consumption?" (not very much); How big do renewable energy facilities have to be, to make a significant contribution? (add one or two zeros to what's happening now); Which efficiency measures offer big savings, and which offer only 5 or 10%? (bye bye to pretty much all the politicians' pet green projects).
Sustainable Energy Without The Hot Air

9. DAVID FLEMING - LEAN LOGIC: A DICTIONARY FOR THE FUTURE AND HOW TO SURVIVE IT.
Lean Logic does not sugar-coat the challenges we face: an economy that destroys the very foundations upon which it depends; climate weirdness; ecological systems under stress; shocks to community and culture. Neither does the book suggest that there are easy or even any solutions to these dilemmas. But a positive spirit infuses its 800 pages : "Large-scale problems do not require large-scale solutions; they require small- scale solutions within a large-scale framework." The book's greatest strength, for this mesmerized reader, is the lightness with which it draws on knowledge from earlier periods of history, and from other cultures.
Lean Logic

10. GAIL 'THE ACTUARY' TVERBERG - OUR FINITE WORLD
Quite apart from the maths, or the thermodynamics, or the simple logic, "a lack of cash flow for investment in infrastructure will eventually bring the system down" says another dry doomer, Gail Tverberg, an actuary. She describes a political impossibility:" the need to make choices on which things we maintain: schools; or roads; or oil distribution pipelines; or a smart electric grid; or our housing stock". She sees no way that we can do them all. "Which roads do we turn from asphalt to gravel? Can we eliminate purchase of military jets? Do we stop building and upgrading schools and universities? Do we stop building new homes and office parks?"
Our Finite World

11. CHARLES HALL - ENERGY RETURN ON INVESTMENT (EROI)
"Few issues are likely to be more important for the future of civilization". The issue? Energy Return on Energy Invested (EROI). EROI represents a simple ratio; the amount of energy obtained from any energy-producing activity divided by the energy used to make that amount of energy available for productive activities. A related term, Net Energy, refers to the remainder from subtracting energy input from energy output. Total Net Energy represents “productive energy”, the energy available for all the economic, social, cultural and other activities of daily life. "The quality of fuels available is at least as important in our assessment as is the quantity" Hall explains; "many of the contemporary changes in our economy are related directly to changing EROI as our premium fuels are increasingly depleted". As the realities of EROI make themselves felt, Hall, a professor of Environmental & Forest Biology, concludes, "Americans will need to acknowledge the reality of biophysical constraints if they are to adapt to the coming energy crisis. Discretionary spending will be increasingly abandoned as humans attempt to meet their basic needs for food, shelter and clothing
New Studies in EROI (Energy Return on Investment)"
See also: Hall, C.A.S.; Klitgaard; K. Energy and the Wealth of Nations: Understanding the Biophysical Economy. Springer: New York, NY, USA, 2011.

12. CUTLER CLEVELAND - TEN FUNDAMENTAL PRINCIPLES OF NET ENERGY
The efficiency and effectiveness of energy capture is a central organizing principle in ecology. Living organisms must capture energy and allocate it among a number of life-sustaining tasks (growth, reproduction, energy storage, defense, competition).The unprecedented expansion of the human population, the global economy, and per capita living standards of the last 200 years was powered by high EROI, high energy surplus fossil fuels.Energy return on investment (EROI) is the ratio of the energy extracted or delivered by a process to the energy used directly and indirectly in that process. Net energy is how much energy is left for productive purposes after the energy needed to find, concentrate and deliver its energy services are subtracted.
Energy Transitions Past and Future
Ten Principles of Net Energy

13. PHIL HENSHAW - SYSTEMS ENERGY ASSESSMENT (SEA)
Most economic sectors use at least give times more energy than is visible, let alone paid for. This is because the standard measures of business energy use, such as Life Cycle Analysis, do not count the energy needs of the distributed and sub-contracted operating services businesses employ. "That uncounted business energy demand is often 80% of the total, an amount of “dark energy” hidden from view". The energy cost to the economy for delivering business products - including energy - is five times more than what was thought when the energy demand is added in of the support services that technology requires to operate and deliver products. Thyese support services include the energy demands of employees, management, design, advertising, maintenance, Insurance, rent and taxes, etc, System Energy Assessment (SEA), measures the combined impacts of these material supply chains and service supply chains, to assess businesses as whole self-managing net-energy systems.
System Energy Assessment (SEA), Defining a Standard Measure of EROI for Energy Businesses as Whole Systems

When he was sixteen years old, Floor van Keulen made a wall painting in the stairwell of his mother's beauty salon. For the next 43 years, the artist has worked with the knowledge that most of his site- and time-specific specific works are destined to disappear. Why?

"When one works in a large format the framework disappears" van Keulen tells an interviewer. "When all goes well, there is a culmination of forms, and the distinction between form and content fades".

At various times, van Keulen's approach has been labelled as action painting, or Wild Painting. He took part in several 'poetry explosion' events at Amsterdam's fabled Paradiso during the 1970s.

Later, Van Keulen experimented with video projections in theatre spaces, and onto buildings. By 2005 he was drawing directly onto buildings using intense rays of pure light. These projections were even more immaterial than a temporary wall painting.

"You need a lot of practice before your hand can can cope with all those turns and subtleties" understates the artist.

At a certain moment, Van Keulen was ready to reflect on what remains from his work so far - principally, photographs and film stills. The result is a 376 page book called Lost Paintings

Two insightful texts, one by Tom Rooduijn and Annerie Smolders, the other by Rudi Fuchs, are delightfully free of art-speak. The rest of the pages are like photo-journalism applied to art: the often-grainy images are at times poignant, sometimes dramatic, but always fresh. The energy of so many different moments is almost tangible - even though the moments have passed.

Is there a single theme in the book? van Keulen is asked. "I have tried to understand and bring order to an unbridled stream of images" he replies - and recalls the words of of another Dutch artist, Cor Blok: "art has the primary function of a eureka moment".

Such moments may be fleeting, but they can nonetheless endure. I'm reminded of David Mamet's words in Three Uses of the Knife: On the Nature and Purpose of Drama: "the good play will not concern itself with cares that can be dealt with rationally".

But food and drink? The branding, the packaging, the communications, the stores, the promotions, the trade shows, the hotels, the restaurants? Would I be wrong to guess that 75% of us have worked for a global food enterprise, directly or indirectly, at some point? I know I have: an industry talk here, a futures workshop there, a couple of healthcare events…

But two new publications this week have left me sick to the stomach. I just don't think it's defensible any more to turn a blind eye to the social and ecological crimes Big Food is committing, in other parts of the world, so that you and I can eat what we damn well feel like.

When it comes to the food business, I've been having my cake, and eating it, since 1995. That was when Vandana Shiva spoke at Doors of Perception 3 about the hidden but devastating ecological and social costs of global industrial agriculture. That was a wake-up call.

Food figured prominently in 2000, too, when we did Doors East in Ahmedabad We learned, then, that for eighty million women in India, who own or look after one or two cows, milk is their only livelihood.

It should not have been a surprise last week, then, to read a grim report entitled The great milk robbery: How corporations are stealing livelihoods and a vital source of nutrition from the poor

[Left: Colombia's jarreadores (Photo: Aurelio Suárez Montoya) Right: mobile milk delivery in Kenya]

In a long and scrupulously documented report, an NGO called Grain confirms the importance of so-called 'people's milk' to the livelihoods and health of hundreds of millions of poor people in the global South - from small-scale farmers and pastoralists, to local cheesemakers and fresh milk vendors. They nearly all supply safe, nutritious and affordable milk at a mainly local scale.

The report chronicles in distressing detail the global push by Big Dairy corporations such as Nestlé, PepsiCo and Cargill to colonise this entire milk flow. Instead of fresh, high-quality milk produced and supplied in the most sustainable ways by small scale farmers, Big Dairy's strategy is to replace their local milk with powdered and processed milk; produce it on highly polluting mega farms; sell it in excessive packaging; display it in wildly over-chilled stores; and, after all that, charge at least double the cost of 'peoples milk'.

A continued shift to large-scale farms would be an environmental and public health catastrophe. Big Dairy's farms guzzle enormous quantities of water, often at the expense of local communities that depend on the same sources. Their mega-farms also require a lot of land – not just for their cows to live on, but to produce their feed.

They also produce massive amounts of waste. An industrial farm with 2,000 cows produces as much waste as a small city.

We know the Big Dairy push is an existential threat to the South because it already happened in the North. The US lost 88 percent of its dairy farms between 1970 and 2006, while the original nine countries of the EU lost 70 percent between 1975 and 1995. Since then, land-grabs and market manipulation have accelerated - accompanied, along the way, by profoundly misguided programmes to impose a high-cost, high-tevch 'green revolution' on Africa's farmers.

Instead of new hybrid seeds, chemical fertilisers and pesticides, family farmers in West Africa said they want to use local seeds, avoid spending precious cash on chemicals and most importantly to direct public agricultural research to meet their needs.

] Where agriculture was born - and is now dying

My sense of quease was further exacerbated last week by reading Food, Farming, and Freedom: Sowing the Arab Spring by Rami Zurayk.

Zurayk, a senior Lebanese agronomist, was not surprised by the Arab Spring. He's been charting the collapse of traditional agricultural livelihoods in the Middle East since the late 1980s - latterly in his blog Land and People. That project grew out of a mobile agricultural clinic designed to help small producers rebuild the livlihoods that their enemy's assaults had shattered.

Zurayk explains that although the Arab Spring may well have been enabled in part by social media, its roots go much deeper.

The middle east is where agriculture first emerged, 10,000 years ago. The most important crops and animal species originated there. Yet today, middle eastern countries are the world's largest importers of food. More than 50 percent of the calories eaten in Lebanon are imported. In Iraq it's worse. In the 1950s, Iraq was self-sufficient in agricultural production; by 2002 she relied on imports for 80-100 percent of many staples.

What went wrong? Can things be fixed?

At one level, when Zurayk explains the between food and farming and the geopolitics of the region, prospects there look grim. Local food production is perceived by enemies of the small farmers to be a form of opposition to their military-territorial objectives. This explains the systematic bulldozing of olive trees, some of them hundreds of years old, in the West Bank and Gaza.

Neo-liberal economic policies have also had catastrophic impacts. Large scale export-oriented agriculture - promoted by global corporations, banks, and many development agencies as the 'road to growth' - has been a boon to local elites. In Lebanon today fifty percent of the farmland is owned by just 3.5 percent of the farmers - usually absentee landlords.

This export-scale agriculture involves the systematic abuse of agrochemicals. Industrial-scale monocultures have caused tremendous damage to biodiversity and to the fertility of the soil itself.

Industrial agriculture is also a major cause of social dislocation. Poor rural people are first displaced from their land; they then do marginalized work in contract farming; when that becomes unsurvivable, they are driven out of farming altogether into the 'misery belts' that surround most cities. There, as patterns of production and consumption have changed, obesity and malnutrition have become widespread among the poorer social classes – the majority of the Arab people..

The pattern is repeated in other African ex-colonies, too, such as Egypt, and Kenya - wherever, in fact, a country is 'opened up' to 'modernisation and development'.

] India steps back

As in the middle east, so too in India, farming and food retail are about more than trade. They are the very stuff of culture and ecology, of food security, of identity and of livelihood.

In 2007, we focused the whole of Doors 9, in Delhi, on food systems. We were told, then, that 29 percent of school-age children in Delhi are classified as obese; that the sugar content of their diet has risen 40 percent during the last 50 years; that its fat content had risen by 20 percent.

Powerful forces were already pushing India to speed up this industrialisation of food and the corporatisation of retail. The informal sector did not sell branded products - so big business did not like them, we were told. The construction lobby and landowners could not tolerate vendors' occupation of commercially viable urban space, for which they pay no rent. Delhi's municipal authorities wanted food sales off the streets as part of a 'clean-up' ahead of the Commonwealth Games.

Large multinational retailers like Wal-Mart, TESCO, Carrefour, and Metro have been trying to expand into India for years - sometimes in partnership, always as teachers, with local business houses such as Reliance, the Tatas, Reliance Industries, Aditya Birla. The grand strategy is to offer cheaper food to price-conscious middle-class Indians.

Last week, India suspended plans to 'open' its $450 billion supermarket sector to foreign firms such as Wal-Mart. The Financial Times complained that this retail 'liberalization… would have improved the functioning of its supply chain". Prior to its suspension, the Economist had praised law for "opening up its underdeveloped and fragmented retail market". A Tesco spokesman said the move was a "missed opportunity for customers".

The language used by the the business press and the management consultants is soporific and reassuring: 'Liberalization' 'Opening up' 'Opportunity'

The realities that these words hide are evil, pure and simple.

] State-of-the-art sustainability

These words are also profoundly old-fashioned.

With 12 million outlets, India has the largest density of small shops in the world. Her so-called 'unorganized' retail sector, with its infrastructure of bazaars, mandis and haats, has evolved over centuries into an ecology of 40 million traders, shopkeepers, hawkers and vendors, together with 650 million farmers.

This amazing ecology is labour-intensive, low entropy, low-cost, decentralized, self-organizing, highly efficient - in a word: resilient.

In sustainability terms, India's legacy farming, food and retail systems are state-of-the-art. And it's this ecology that 'organized retail' wants to sweep away.

The corporate take-over of retail is often justified in terms of efficiency. Corporate boosters argue that 40 per cent of horticulture produce in India is wasted. In the informal sector, the opposite is the case: fruit and vegetables that go bad are eaten by cows, or are composted. This recycling of organic matter is only possible in a highly decentralized system. The global giants are the real wasters. Globalised retail is responsible for the waste of 50 percent of food - not the small farmers and retailers.

Another argument is that farmers will get better prices in a more 'efficient' system. Yeah, sure. Nowhere in the world is there evidence that corporations like Walmart and Tesco have increased returns to indigenous subsistence farmers. Their entire business model is based on industrialising production, buying at extremely low prices, and undercutting small retailers and street vendors.

Says Vandana Shiva: "the Walmart model is a model for genocide. A retail monopoly, by buying below the cost of production, and by robbing them of other markets through destroying other alternatives, will destroy farmers". In the past decade, 200,000 farmers have committed suicide in India. For Shiva, this is a direct result of agricultural modernization, including the introduction of genetically modified crops.

] Superfoods

A couple of months back I heard a woman from Pepsico talk about her company's big push into 'superfoods'. Pepsico will work every angle hard to persuade people to pay premiums of at least 25% on their 'super' eats. This has got to mean a *heap* of new work for designers.

But, after reading this week's reports, I've got to say something: for me, given what I know now, working for these guys would be like supping with the devil. During the past years of step-by-step incremental change, of being reasonable, of being grown-up, the situation on the ground - for millions of vulnerable people, and untold vulnerable ecosystems - has gotten steadily worse.

What, you will fairly ask, are you supposed to do with this statement? I don't know. It's a dilemma, not a problem to be solved.

[Left: "The Hill Farmer" by Bedwyr Williams. Right: a nuke]

North West Wales has the ingredients to be one of Europe's most resilient regions. Its valuable assets include a lot of relatively undamaged land; clean air and biodiversity; abundant water; sea; low population density; and a deeply-rooted language and culture, supported by dense social networks - "a bit like the roots of a leek" as Dr Einir Young put it to me - in which land, mind and spirit continue, powerfully, to resonate.

] Energy Island

A much contested proposal is that Anglesey, adjacent to Bangor, should be developed as an Energy Island. In a last throw of the dice for the thermo-industrial economy, Horizon Nuclear Power, which is part owned by the French EDF, wants to build "two or three" nuclear reactors on the island.

Anglesey was the breadbasket of Wales not so long ago, and is surely needed to serve that function again. The proposition that a 3.3GW nuclear plant might be included in a "mix" with food growing is not well aligned, to put it mildly, with a resilient economy.

Anglesey's nukes are unlikely, on balance, to be built. Capital costs determine their economic viability and capital is in - well, let's call it short supply. They nonetheless remain a looming elephant in the region's room. (Curiously, the only discussions that crop up during my visit concern what to do about roosting bats displaced by site clearance - and the decision to build a third bridge off the island for people to escape if a nuke blows.).

] Bridge to the future

Sitting between the Big of the nukes and the Small of the rest is Bangor University and its £37 million arts and innovation centre, Pontio.

That's one ambitious bridge. A discussion has therefore started in earnest about what Pontio's priorities should be, and why. Last week I joined this conversation at event in Bangor called Innovation In A Small Nation

The format was simple: flying visits to local projects that are the seedlings of an emerging new economy, followed by multi-disciplinary workshops to explore what might be done to help them flourish.

] Bioeconomy

Dr Adam Charlton, a researcher at the Biocomposites Centre in the Welsh Institute for Natural Resources, described to me a plausible and enticing future bio-economy.

A network of grassland micro-refineries would transform biomass into a range of fuels and materials. These would replace industrial chemicals traditionally produced from oil - from agrochemicals, biofuels, and water treatment, to lubricants, adhesives, coatings, waxes, biopolymers, packaging, essential oils, cosmetics, personal care products, nutraceuticals - the possibilities seemed endless. These product lines could be worth £500m to the Welsh economy.

A new demonstration programme called Beacon is the next step in Wales' ambitions to be a centre for bio-refining. Geneticists, microbiologists and agriculture experts are collaborating to build a medium-sized bio-refinery with the capacity to produce on the thousand-litre scale. It will turn locally grown crops such as rye grass, miscanthus, oats and artichokes into the fuels, plastic composites, pharmaceuticals and other commercial products that Charlton told me about.

The promise of a bioeconomy is real enough - but so are the dangers. In other parts of the world, vast tracts of rainforest are being cleared to make way for biofuel producing crops - some of which function as aggressive invasive species. Controversy also surrounds the displacement of crops for food by crops for fuel. A third concern: whenever you gather a lot of biomass at a central location, one output will be large amounts of nutrients and biochemical oxygen demand that often degrade water quality.

For Beacon's funders, its task is to deliver 200 businesses - not to strengthen the ecological resilience of Wales. True, Beacon's policy is to use plants that do not need to be cultivated on the best food-growing land. But in other countries land classified as "marginal" often turns out to be the home of rural populations living more lightly on the land than we do.

A bio-economy that simply substitutes biofuels for fossil fuels is not a green one. The strongest demand for bio-products comes from the most resource-hungry sectors of the doomsday economy: aviation, the military, pharma.

If compound economic growth remains unchallenged as the First Directive of Welsh development, it will be hard for Welsh bio-innovators to put the health of the soil ahead of pressure from powerful global markets.

Hard - but not impossible. Finland, with a far bigger biomass resource than Wales, is exploring bio-economic solutions based on "different forms of earning logic" because 'the market for small-scale is large".

Could Wales focus its nascent bio-economy on regional rather than global needs? To do so, it would need to embrace a new notion of economic progress that is restorative rather than extractive. And to achieve that, she would need to foster novel connections among companies from different industries that are not accustomed to working together.

Good, because Innovation In A Small Nation was about just this latter kind of connectivity.

] Stewards of the soil

Could a future bio-economy be consistent with the long-term health of Welsh soil - its 'terroir'? I next meet a man who thinks about little else. Tom DeLuca, Professor of of Environmental Sciences at the university, tells me, unprompted, that he was "awake all night worrying about disturbing the soil". (That's him on the left above, together with a bunch of biomass).

"The health of the soil is crucial to food security over the long term" DeLuca explains, "but we keep stripping nutrients from rural areas and feeding cities with them. Plants and soil are symbiotic, a single living system". We should not treat them separately - but market pressures often force us to do just that.

DeLuca's immediate concern is the commissioning of a new rhizotron. This below-ground laboratory, set to be the only one of its kind in the UK, will enable scientists to study soils and plant roots in situ, and thereby advance our understanding of soil carbon dynamics and plant-soil interactions.

DeLuca's colleagues are also studying aspects of North Wales as an ecology of bioregions. An ongoing "catchment to coast" study, for example, enables soil science to collaborate with ocean science in a single context.

The aim is to integrate the study of rivers, estuaries and coastal waters within a single functional and linked system, and to understand how nutrients and organic matter introduced into the sea from rivers can affect coastal water chemistry and productivity.

] Salt of the sea

The coast is not unexplored territory for Welsh innovators. A canny entrepeneur called David Lea-Wilson sells a million-plus tubes of Halen Mon 'gourmet sea salt' to upscale restaurants and one-percenters in 23 countries.

Halen Mon salt sells for a nifty 22 times the price of supermarket salt - but Lea-Wilson does not apologise. "The price reflects what it costs to make" he says; "the salt crystals are harvested, rinsed, dried and packed entirely by hand".

Artisan sea salt making was a major activity in Britain once before. It was displaced in the nineteenth century by the industrial-scale processing of underground rock into what we now know as table salt. In recent times, as word spread that chemicals such as sodium ferrocyanide are added to make supermarket salt flow easily, the cheap product has had a bad press.

Sea salt, promoted as the pure alternative, has not been without its own critics. Our team's visit to Halen Mon coincided with media reports that questioned the health benefits of sea salt. Lea_Wilson has robust and persuasive answers to these latest questions.

Besides, the challenge posed to our team of explorers concerned not salt, but water. Specifically, what use might be found for the 20 tonnes of distilled water that the company produces a day during its salt extraction process?

An initial brainstorm threw up applications to do with steam irons, micro-brewing, and pisciculture. My own first thought, given Lea-Wilson's celebrated talents as an entrepreneur, was that he should freeze the stuff and sell it in Greenland's restaurants as organic ice.

On further reflection, Halen Mon can clearly play a big role in the innovation of products based on the outputs of Adam Charlton's biorefineries.

] Green Shangri-la

Our next stop was the Celtic Round House at Cae Mabon, an enchanting eco-retreat located in a forest clearing by a rushing river not far from Bangor.

Twenty five years ago, when Eric Maddern, an Australian storyteller (and, latterly, an honorary Chief Bard of the Order of Bards, Ovates and Druids) first moved into the valley, he built a thatched roundhouse of the kind the region's ancestors lived in for three thousand years before the coming of the Romans.

Twenty years on, the Cae Mabon clearing now contains seven elegant natural dwellings. These include a strawbale Hogan, an oak and slate longhouse, and a cob cottage. The site, judged recently to be the number one natural building project in the UK, was described as a ‘Welsh Shangri-La hanging on a hillside overlooking the mountains of Snowdonia’.

The built dwellings on their own are not yet the basis of a sustainable rural enteprise. Maddern needs to innovate new services and activities to make use of the buildings; (they can accommodate up to 30 people). He needs to market these to new groups of people; take bookings and enable transactions; and coordinate all the activities - from food, to parking - that use of the site by a group entails. And he needs to do all this without compromising the unique spirit of the place.

Cae Mabon is a tiny business that has received no EU or government grants in 25 years. For its future sustainability, a long-term solution needs to be found. Sites such as Cae Mabon are like the region's antibodies. They play a literally vital role in healing the crippling disconnection within Western culture between body, soul, spirit, and place.

] Hill farm as learning farm

Our next stop is Moel Y Ci, an old Welsh hill farm that is now constituted as a social enterprise with 700 community shareholders. This ownership model enables local people to share responsibility for a shared heritage of natural, social and cultural resources.

[Pic: Jon Harold stands in a bird hide that was constructed at Moelyci using traditional carpentry methods. Photograph: Gareth Phillips/Guardian]

On-site activities range from large-scale composting for the local authority, and training in such field skills as coppicing and hurdle-making, to a market garden complete with sizeable polytunnels and to 50 allotment gardens.

One field has been turned over for intercropping of soft fruits and wildflowers. Another field is the home to rare fungi, discovered by a volunteer; Moelyci turns out to be one of the most important wax cap sites in Europe.

There is also a resident ecologist because the land includes a Site of Special Scientific Interest.

Moelyci is bustling, even in late November. The centre's two founders and (unpaid) directors, Della and John Fazey, make a convincing case that the farm can be a high value learning resource. Local people learn conservation skills and environmental management, food production, horticulture, tree surgery and so on - all on the job. Perhaps as valuable: They reconnect with nature as they do so.

Moelyci receives no steady long-term funding. Ten years on, the Fazeys still spend a huge amount of time writing grant applications, to a bewildering array of potential funders, to keep things going. For researchers in the university, writing grant applications is second nature - and professors usually get grad students to churn out the mountains of paperwork that keep a department's research funds flowing. Moelyci's most pressing need as an alternative to endless grind of grant writing.

] Model farm - old as new

On our way back to Bangor we visit another stunning building, Hendre Hall which was built as a model farm in the nineteenth century.

[Pic: James Innes, on the left, who runs Hendre Hall's events, talking to Dr Andy Goodman from Pontio]

The model of agriculture Hendre was built to embody has disappeared from most of the UK - but less so in Wales. Anglesey was the breadbasket of Wales just a couple of generations ago and can be so again.The physical conditions exist for the region to rediscover the best of pre-industrial agriculture; innovate new services to make it viable; and also innovate a mosaic of new-generation rural enterprises.

A network of rural hubs coud play a key role in such a transformation - and Hendre Hall would make a brilliant one of those. The question is: How?

] Enterprise By Design

After these flying visits, we return to the university to discuss what these disparate assets might mean for Innovation In A Small Nation - and what role Pontio might play in the emergence of a restorative new economy.

Pontio is a a wee bit over-specified for a rural enterprise hub - but, tant pis, the building will happen. The opportunity now is to develop an engaging script around which a multitude of potential actors and crew can coalesce.

North Wales is blessed with a multitude of promising actors - from local energy projects to permaculture networks and courses. The region's assets also include established centres with their own networks such as the nearby Centre for Alternative Technology which is world famous in its own right as a centre for environmental inspiration and courses.

There also exist new models in Wales of rural enterprise centres that draw on old roots but operate in a modern and networked way. My favourite example is the Myddfai Trading Company in South Wales. The narrative is is inspired by the Physicians of Myddfai who were herbalists in the twelfth century. Now, some time later, a £450,000 BIG Lottery Fund grant has enabled the village to set up a social enterprise that is nurturing a variety of new start-up businesses.

A thought occurs: For the cost of one nuclear power station (in round numbers: five billion pounds excluding government subsidies, insurance, accidents, waste, safety, security, or decommissioning) one could give grants £3m plus to each of the 1,357 villages in Wales

] Script revision

In filmic terms, the original Pontio 'treatment' - which persuaded its investors to shell out 37 million pounds for the building - revolves around an idea of innovation dominated by technology and the promise of compound economic growth.

This original script cannot be scrapped, but it can surely be improved. Scripts alway evolve. Its next iteration needs to focus on the emerging restorative economy whose vitality is based on social-technical innovation at the service of the 'net present assets' of the region.

A shift in emphasis along these lines might not be that hard an ask. For example, the co-sponsor with Pontio of Innovation In A Small Nation was the university's Centre for Advanced Software Technology and its EU programme Inventorium. You might think, as I did at first, that a digital centre of excellence would be an unlikely bedfellow for permaculture farming or druidic retreats. In the event, the Inventorium team ventured outside its natural comfort zone with positive energy and good humour.

Small nations can be flexible in ways that big one cannot.

Additonally, although Wales is famous for its language, there seems to be little patience with talking shops. An important department within Pontio will be Enterprise By Design. Dr Andy Goodman, one of the originators of programme, tells me his group is determined to develop self-sustaining projects that connect the university with small companies and communities externally - and end up as a viable business. Goodman and his colleagues have developed and tested a project model that works; the next phase is to choose partners to work with - and that remains, healthily, an open book.

With this kind start-an-enterprise engine under its hood, Pontio is well-paced to connect disparate companies and communities, support their meetings, and host their conversations. This connecting can be the most important kind of innovation that Pontio does.

] Spirit of the place

When I set out on foot to catch a 6am train, Bangor's railway station and surrounding area have been plunged into darkness by a power cut. If this is a peak-oil practice drill, Bangor comes out well. A solitary guard used the flashlight on his mobile phone to iliuminate the platform, and the atmosphere among the dozen or so of my shadowy fellow passengers was rather cheerful.

Who needs blazing artificial light when you have that kind of spirit?

Teg yw edrych tuag adref.

"If we wait for the governments, it'll be too little, too late. If we act as individuals, it'll be too little. But if we act as communities, it might just be enough, just in time".

This month saw the launch of three new outputs from Transition Network. These are a new book,‘The Transition Companion’; an online directory of Transition Ingredients and Tools; and a set of Ingredients and Tools Cards.

As the Occupy movement, too, begins to explore the question, "How Do You Code A Movement?" this seemed like a good moment to catch up with Transition's web coordinator, Ed Mitchell, and ask him a question: How do you put all that experience into a website for others to share?

The short answer is: you don't.

In talking with Ed I learn to change my initial question. Contextual knowledge of the kind created by Transition groups exists among an ecology of actors and resources. It is lived, embodied, situated knowledge. Putting knowledge into an airless 'bank' is liable to kill it. I should better ask: what kind of web service, tools and approaches are needed to support the continuous flow of knowledge among communities when and where it is most needed?

The context is exciting, but challenging. Transition initiatives and groups have been multiplying at extraordinary speed. Among the 900 initiatives are officially designated Transition Towns (or cities, districts, villages - and even a forest) plus a larger number of communities that are 'mulling it over' as they consider the possibility of launching their own Transition Initiative formally.

To support this ecology of projects and groups, Transition Network has set up an international network of 95 Transition Trainers in 25 countries. They help provide training on a local basis. There are now also National Hub organizations in 12 countries that provide additional local support and networking.

Among the practical changes already achieved are Transition Lewes’s community-owned renewable solar energy company
and Transition Brixton’s local currency that recently introduced pay by text transactions with the participation of local businesses.

Given this explosion of activity, Ed's starting point is that the Transition web project is not about the delivery of pre-packaged content. "Transition Network is a support organization, not a political party HQ", he tells me. "Our approach is not to tell groups what to do, but to facilitate the effective sharing of ideas and resources between initiatives".

Technically, this has involved the development of what Ed calls a "Product Sharing Engine" (below):

Ed's approach from the start has been that face-to-face is overwhelmingly the most important mode of communication for Transitioners. He is committed to cause Transitioners to "spend as little time in front of computer screens as possible".

Ed is therefore much more than a web developer or platform builder. His work spans network, community and event design, and facilitation. "Sharing community-based knowledge depends multiple elements in different combinations at different times", he explains; "there can be no one-size-fits-all solution".

Transition's work is inspired by one of Buckminster Fuller's insights - the system-scale rule. This is the idea that large-scale problems do not require large scale solutions - they require small scale solutions within a large-scale framework.

Transition Network's tiny staff engages with a grassroots movement in which many thousands of people are developing models, tools and methodologies in a variety of contexts. In this spirit, Rob Hopkins' new book is filled with ingredients, not with rules.

These ingredients are laid out in stages relating to the Transition process - from deciding to give Transition a go (‘Starting out’), to making localisation a reality on the ground (‘Building’).

Back in 2009, Ed was given a budget of £36,000 ($57,000) to work with. He first asked for suggestions on which web tools and processes would be resilient enough to support the changing needs of transition groups around the world. The result was a huge list. He quickly decided that "this will kill me if I try to implement them all. From the start, I wanted to avoid the trap of trying to build a huge platform that would never be finished".

Ed's approach is to augment the practical needs and requirements of Transitioners - not keep them stuck in front of screens all day. He admits to a "cordial hatred… of the way many social media managers talk casually about 'driving people to the site' or 'keeping people online. The idea that living online and tweeting and blogging all day is nonsense".

I ask Ed about the architecture of the Transition web service. "The Transition Network site is not in the middle" Ed explains; "there is no middle. Our idea is is to enable the widest distribution of project cases as possible, not to gather them all together in one place".

I ask Ed how he measures progress and assures quality. "We did look at such functions as voting, and star-rating widgets" he tells me, but "in the event, the ratings tools never worked properly. Our preferred approach is to enable a kind of distributed guided search in which human beings advise each other on which, in their direct experience, is the best source of help to turn to".

The Transition wiki states, "Here's how it all appears to be evolving...". I ask Ed how on earth he keeps up when things are moving so fast. "We can't control the situation" Ed replies, cheerfully. "I suppose we could employ reseachers to record all our information on Excel spreadsheets. But, well, we just don't". Ed does concede that Transition Network could probably use an historian, or a librarian.

Three years after Ed first inspired me with his non-techie vision of how the web could help Transition movement, a new Stories Project has just been launched. Twelve 'social reporters' around The United Kingdom will each produce one blog post every day on a subject set by a guest editor at the beginning of the week.

The aim, as Ed's colleague Charlotte du Cann explains it, is "to communicate the real-life issues and experiences of being in Transition…a new narrative for the ‘down curve’ of consumption and energy use". To show and record what is really happening in Transition towns across the country, in the neighbourhood, inside ourselves".

"We're not trying to convert users into viral marketing evangelists" Ed explains. "We're exploring a channel through which people can tell their own stories of the ins and outs of their lives, and to help connect communities as they struggle through an unknown present and uncharted future.

"We've built a website, but at every point we question the concept of centrally-controlled systems and authority" Ed concludes.

"The aim has always been to see the website as a star in a Transition Constellation rather than a 'Hub' with spokes".

[Two previous articles on Transition by this writer are here and here

There are times when you have to wonder whether ad industry persons totally, er, get it, on the matter of man's disconnect with nature... and what to do about it.

This Aigle ad, which I tore out the Air France magazine, reads "For the re-introduction of man in nature". Yeah, right. And go buy some Chantebelle welly boots while you think about it.

Mind you, when it comes to the eroticizing of biophilia, the art directors of Corriere probably win hands down....

LONDON WEDNESDAY 7 DECEMBER 6.30pm
Sustain Talks on the theme of 'Moving Minds'. What actually works: stories, or actions? words, or deeds? With Howard Jones from the Eden Project, Alison Tickell from Julie's Bicycle, and me. It's free but you have to reserve a seat. Lecture Theatre 1, Royal College of Art Kensington Gore SW7 2EU

BRIGHTON THURSDAY 8 DECEMBER 5.30pm
University of Brighton Visiting Artists Society event in which I'll be talking with Marek Kohn author of, inter alia, Turned Out Nice: How the British Isles will Change as the World Heats Up and Mischa Hewitt who built Earthship Brighton. We will each begin with burning issue that people are ignoring or just Don't Get - and take it from there. UBVAS (University of Brighton Visiting Artists Society), Board room (M2), Brighton University of Architecture & Design, 68 Grand Parade BN2 0JY Also free but you need to reserve a seat: brightondesigngraduates (at) gmail dot com

[I borrowed the image from Koen Vanmechelen's Cosmopolitan Chicken Project]

Hanging out with health system innovators in recent times I've been struck by two interesting things. The first is that the buzz in the investor community about health apps is palpable. To feed the hunger, a new incubator called Rock Health, positioning itself as "the seed accelerator for health startups", promises to "power the next generation of the digital health ecosystem" and bring together "the brightest minds in technology and healthcare".

All this would be great were were it not for the second thing I've learned: there's almost no contact between the health apps crowd and the food system crowd. And this is weird.

The need for a whole systems approach is urgent. In the US, one in five children aged 6 to 11 is now obese. Each one of them risks heart disease and diabetes in later life. Industrialised food is one of the major causes of these childrens' sickness. If more of them had access to better and affordable food, fewer people would get diabetes and heart disease - and many of the hot new diabetes-monitoring iPhone apps would not be needed.

Why is this nightmare happening? Well, between 1995 and 2010, North American taxpayers spent over $260 billion on subsidies of junk food ingredients compared to $262 million - *one thousand times less* - subsidising apples [which is pretty much the only fresh food to get a subsidy at all].

Where's the app to fix that?

Of course it's hard. Maybe it'll take a saint to figure out how to be a whole-systems, whole-food entrepreneur. But in the absence of such a saint, we probably need to call these things sickness apps, not health apps.

Thankfully there's a lot of service innovation - if less investor frenzy - in the local food system space.

A new kind of community supported agriculture [CSA] project has been launched in Paris, for example.

“La Ruche Qui Dit Oui” ("The hive that says yes!" or LRDQ) is a business model and web platform that enables anyone to set up a fair trade organic food distribution and supply network - and make a sustainable social business out of it at the same time.

Compared to traditional community supported agriculture [CSA] schemes, LRDQ enable consumers to choose the products they want to receive rather than be sent a box full of produce chosen by the farmers.

La Ruche is the brainchild of Guilhem Cheron, an industrial designer and chef. He drew on expertise gained during fifteen years in the design industry to develop new ways for people to develop better relationships with the farmers their food came from. With the motto “Manger mieux, manger juste” (“Eat Better, Eat Fair”) La Ruche cuts out traditional food system intermediaries - but also supports local hives on practical matters to do with information, logistics and other issues.

Anyone can start her or his own “hive”. They look for local food producers to work with, and recruit neighbours, friends, and family into their hive. The ideal number seems to be 30-50 people. Among the nearly 150 hives established to date, the average La Ruche member lives in the city, uses social networks regularly, has a full time job, and has an average age of 29.

Once the hive is up-and-running, producers offer their product at a desired price, and hive members place their orders. The producer receives exactly the price asked for, but the consumer pays 20% more than that. Of this, 10% goes to the leader or administrator of the community ruche; 7% to La Ruche HQ; 3% for taxes and bank fees.

Although most of the day-to-day interaction - such as contacting new suppliers, distributing the offer of products, aggregating offers - is internet-based, a social element is integral to the scheme. Delivery and distribution of orders happens one day per week at a convenient location; there, hive members get together to distribute the produce.

Guillem and his team are constantly looking for ways to make the system responsive to everyday needs. For example, if a whole cheese is too big for a single family, how can quarters and halves be supplied in a way that works for both sides of the exchange?

“I didn’t invent anything new" Guillem told Ortiz, "I just merged different ideas into a service that worked better for the people involved. We've designed a tool that can make the distribution and exchange process ten times faster, and easier, and be more appealing, than existing systems. An important aspect has been to create a a social enterprise model rather than just a voluntary organisation, such as the AMAPs.

At the moment, the La Ruche is only available in France. But this type of web-enabled direct distribution has huge potential on a global scale.

Third world coffee farmers, for example, receive a paltry 10 per cent, at best, of the eventual retail price. Along with the negative effect this has had on living conditions, the drive for increased output has had a knock-on effect on the environment as well, with mono-cropping and sun grown coffee now the norm.

La Ruche is one among a bunch of new online marketplaces to be springing up. In France, a new conference of food platform developers called Techfoodtook place in Paris this summer. And In the US, too, several such projects were documented at the website Food + Tech Connect when it posed the question: How Can Information & Technology Be Used To Hack The Food System?

Farmigo, for example, consumers to find, select, and receive fresh food from local farms and producers that are delivered direct to convenient pick-up locations. Farmigo charges a 2% transaction fee for food sold through the system. This is paid by the producer and does not impact the price shown to consumers.

] Face time before transaction time

Online platforms like La Ruche and Farmigo are terrific development - but it's an exaggeration to claim, as Farmigo does, that they are "providing an alternative food system". In systems-speak, they're providing the technical bit of a social-technical system which is a much bigger and more complex thing than a web platform.

For one thing, many otherwise passionate and reform-minded farmers, and other food system actors, are wary. “We just prefer real face to face time,” a meat processor told FoodTech Connect. “We do our processing by hand.”

Transparency, it emerges again and again, is not only a technical feature. Even when people are keen to try innovative approaches, a lot of trust-building face-to-face time is needed to set a new food system.

David Barrie, who led our urban farming project in Middlesbrough as part of Dott 07, had at least 50 face to face meetings before the first carrot was even planted. "That critical early period involved a lot of networking meetings with people in local government" David recalls; "I had to identify and connect with people responsible for many different services in the town - and then get them to take responsibility for supporting different strands of work in the urban farming project itself".

We also discovered during Dot07 that many lessons we were learning for the first time had been common currency for 20 years in other parts of the world.

In the developing south, for example, the complex social-ecological networks of urban agriculture have been studied since three early 1990s.

Such books as Agriculture in Urban Planning or Agropolis are filled with case studies from Argentina, Botswana, Cote d'Ivoire, Cuba, France, Togo, Tunisia, and Zimbabwe.

NOTE Material in this story about La Ruche Qui Dit Oui is taken from on the masters thesis of Natalie Ortiz: "A New Sustainable Designer: A Case Study of Collaborative Services and Creative Communities". For a copy of her thesis please contact natyort [at] gmail dot com

It's easy for two people to look at the same information - such as this chart (above) about health costs - and perceive totally different things. What I see is an out-of-control Medical Industrial Complex that's heading, Icarus-like, for collapse. What many designers see is a sea of opportunity - and boy do they want a piece of that action.

They are not alone. Many city-regions regions see the 'health space' as an opportunity for growth. In the Netherlands, for example, Groningen's Healthy Ageing Campus is billed as a "research and entrepreneurship zone" that will focus on healthcare, food & health, medical technology, and pharma.

In Eindhoven, too, a project called Brainport Health Innovation (BHI) will focus on "well-being for the elderly and chronically ill…while generating economic opportunities for the region".

The pattern is Europe-wide: an organization called Healthclusternet is encouraging all the EU's 27 member nations to develop "regional health systems and health innovation markets".

The promise of economic opportunity persuaded its sponsors to pay for last week's World Design Forum in Eindhoven on the theme of "Creating a Caring Society".

The only problem? Our discussion raised the possibility that a complex, doctor-intensive, technology-based approach may not be an affordable, or even necessary, ingredient of caring society.

My contrarian advice was that we need to grow care systems based on five per cent of the costs per person that we have now. This sounds like a fantasy, but is not. In Cuba, for example, where food, petrol and oil all have been scarce for of 50 years as a consequence of economic blockades, its citizens "achieve the same level of health for only 5% of the health care expenditure of Americans."

The use of Cuba as a benchmark is a hard sell at health industry events. Imagine my surprise in Eindhoven, then, when a Cuban-style strategy was advocated by someone with real financial clout. Roger van Boxtel, CEO of a big Dutch insurance company, Menzis, used this [admittedly hideous] upside-down pyramid to describe how his company plans to re-direct spending for its two million insured clients.

The tiny triangle on top of the right-hand pyramid - marked "soon" - represents pretty much the entirety of resources for today's Medical Industrial Complex. When I asked the head of a huge hospital, on the same panel, what he made of this startling transformation in resource allocation, his rueful reply was that "if he says so, that's the way things will go".

Menzis does not propose to do away with hospitals altogether. But it does intend to reduce costs radically by focusing common procedures at a small number of preferred suppliers. It will send all patients for hip replacement, for example, to one clinic, Maartsenkliniek, which already performs 700 hip operations a year.

Logically, it is hard to see why Menzis' inversion of the Follow-The-Money principle should stop at Dutch borders. An international patient visiting India can save 70 to 80 per cent on the average cost of similar procedure back home. Hip replacement surgery at the top rated hospital in India costs US$5,000 - including the cost of an FDA approved implant or prosthesis.

] Departure Lounge

Medical tourism to India is not the kind of patient journey that intrigues designers - or at least, not yet.

In Eindhoven, our jaws dropped at a gorgeous presentation, by Paul Priestman, of his Recovery Room of the future. Priestman drew on his expertise as designer of Lufthansa's first class cabin to argue that hospitals do not have to be clinical, inefficient and unwelcoming.

Lufthansa-quality recovery lounges in hospitals would of course be lovely - but they are unlikely to reduce the cost explosion in health. The cost to an airline for a ‘super first class’ model, with its 600 parts, can reach $160k [114k euros] per seat. When you consider that only five per cent of the world's population has flown on an airplane at all, let alone in first class, high-end Recovery Lounges look likely to remain a niche market.

To be fair, Priestman was adamant that design quality in hospitals does not have to be ruinously expensive. His firm has also designed 50,000 hotel rooms for a hotel chain within a much tighter budget per-bed than in a new hospital. But if Roger van Boxtel's cost-reducing strategy is where things are headed, the design opportunity concerns a radically different kind of patient journey.

] Care: the social space

A key principle of Cuba's system is that health and wellbeing are not something ‘delivered’, like a pizza, by distant suppliers. In Cuba's - and Menzis' - version of a caring society, value is created by mutually supportive relationships between people in a real-world context, away from big medical institutions. This is no small shift of emphasis; the 'delivery' metaphor is pervasive in the developed world's systems.

That said, Cuban-style 5% health is not about a u-turn back to a pre-scientific age. It's about focusing resources and creativity on the 95% of care that happens outside the medical system already, today. It’s about re-imagining the 'health space' as a social and ecological context which, like a garden, needs to be cared for - collaboratively.

] Dementia Challenge

Welcome signs of a care-as-ecosystem approach are emerging in the UK. The Department of Health and the Design Council are running a competition to rethink life with dementia. The stated objective of this 400,000 euro ($580k) challenge is "to get new solutions up and running and into the hands of the people who need them".

The UK project, dangling an economic carrot to encourage partipants, describes the baby boomer generation as "a large group of sophisticated consumers looking for products and services to support them in their later years". But the 16 service ideas shortlisted are relatively low-cost, low-tech and people-focused solutions that are unlikely to excite a red-blooded VC. They include online and physical tools for better collaborative care between relatives, friends, and professionals. A web-based service would help carers find part-time work, and people with dementia contribute to society. A service to facilitate daily journeys for people with dementia is envisaged. A volunteer network would locate and safely return people with dementia who wander is described. There's a website and peer-to-peer platform for carers to deal with diagnosis and planning.

The Design Council's shortlist does include the odd high-tech gizmo, such as a wristband for monitoring the location of people with dementia that includes 3D accelerometers and RFID. But the tech component overall is at the service of social innovation, not its driver.

The Design Council also promises entrants "100% ownership of the intellectual property rights to your idea". But even that remnant of old-paradigm care-as-business thinking is easily surmounted: Most the tech-enabled functions described in the shortlist already exist as open source applications in Pachube.

] Care co-ops

One of the main reasons industrial world health systems are unfit for purpose is that they under-value socially-created knowledge and socially-delivered support. This is why open source health, and learning how to create and grow care co-operatives and other forms of care collaboration is so important.

Something special is happening in France. A nationwide campaign will be launched next week by the Colibris movement for the 2012 Presidential Elections - but without a charismatic leader. The campaign, instead, is for everyone to be a candidate - for a new kind of politics.

In their language and tone-of-voice Les Colibris are like the Transition Movement, but different. They are like Occupy Wall Street but different, too. This is surely healthy. The movement for a global democracy is an ecology, not a single homogeneous movement.

"We know that an election won't change society" says the Colibris manifesto [colibris is the French for hummingbird]. "For a real transformation, things have to change at the bottom and involve everyone amongst us".

But Les Colibris, who call themselves a 'Movement for the Earth and Humanity', are not just about grassroots activity. They also highlight global issues that traditional politics is unable to engage with: climate change; the sixth massive extinction of species; the fact that nearly a blllion people on our planet are the victim of famine.

The idea is not to vote for a programme, or delegate power to a government, say the Colibris. The aim is to mobilize much wider participation in the radical social experiments that have emerged in recent years: low-impact housing, off-grid energy, seed sharing, community-supported agriculture.

Social transformation is already happening, say Les Colibris, but now it is the time to deepen and amplify that change.

The founder of les Colibris is a 73 year old Algerian-born farmer, philosopher and environmentalist called Pierre Rabhi. Without being a presidential candidate, this remarkable figure is having an extraordinary impact on the culture of this resolutely human-centered, nature-dominating country.

Back in January I joined the second of two sell-out crowds in Le Vigan, a small Cevennes town near where I live, to hear Pierre Rabhi speak.

He talked about 'the deep fear that is in us all' as the impacts of modernity are felt. He went on to describe such concepts as "happy sobriety", a "de-growth economy", and "agro-ecology".

Rabhi's language is alien, to put it mildly, to the normal rhetoric of hustings politics. But this was a culturally-mixed and decidedly unsentimental crowd. They came in large numbers - in le Vigan, as elsewhere in France - because here, for the first time, is a public figure who makes an economy of moderation and balance sound attractive, and do-able. The atmosphere when Rabhi speaks is the opposite of sanctimonious. On the contrary: he is is catalysing a social movement that, while serious and determined, is also light. Rabhi even made a joke about cutting own oak trees.

Asked, towards the end of his Le Vigan meeting, whether he believed in life after death, the non-candidate for President of France replied that 'I'm more preoccupied with life before death... but in the long run, I am compost'.

Pierre_Rabhi [I'm quoting Wikipedia here] was born into a Muslim family an an oasis in southern Algeria, in 1938. His mother died when he was four years old. His father, a blacksmith, musician and poet, was forced by economic circumstances to close his workshop and work in the mines. The father persuaded a French couple to raise Pierre; his childhood thereafter was shared between France and Algeria, and the Catholic and Muslim worlds, until he was 14.

He chose to convert to Christianity when he was sixteen, and completed two years of secondary education, but had to leave college because his family were unable to cover the costs. When the Algerian War broke out in 1954, Rabhi was rejected by his father for having converted to Christianity, and by his adoptive father following a dispute. He decided to settle in Paris.

In France, Rabhi, with no knowledge of agriculture, moved with his new family to the country; this was well before the French 'neo-rural' movement of the late 1960s. In 1963, after three years working as an agricultural worker, he became a goat farmer. Appalled by the impacts of industrialised agriculture on ecosystems he had witnessed in the Sahara, and around him in France, he developed the practice of ecological agriculture.

"I am often called a philosopher", Rabhi told an interviewer, "but you must know that I came to ecology through farming". On his farm in the Cevennes of Ardèche, he has lived for 13 years without electricity, water, or modern technology. Through this experiment he has discovered that "man has created a radical break between activities that enable them to feed themselves and essential principles of nature. The little plot of land that I cultivated in Ardèche widened my horizons and enabled me to connect with time and space all around the world"

Rabhi wondered whether his experiment was transmissible. In 1985, he set up an agro-ecology training centre; and in 1988 he also founded an International forum for the sharing of knowledge about applied agricultural practices, CIEPAD. "I realized that the South had been trapped by modernity, that it was connected through chemical fertilizers and pesticides" he explained; 'the South is especially affected by ecological disasters, by the disappearance of animal and vegetal biodiversity, by desertification'. He has since launched oversees development programmes in Morocco, Palestine, Algeria, Tunisiea, Senegal, Togo, Benin, Mauritaniea, Poland and the Ukraine.

Rabhi's work had a big influence on the emerging anti-globaization movement. He is a member of the board of editors of the French monthly La Décroissance- 'De-Growth'.

He is also vice president of the Kokopelli Foundation.

Kokopelli works to protect biodiversity in the production and distribution of organically and biodynamically grown seeds, and for the regeneration of the fertility of cultivated soils.

In 2009, Rabhi founded Terre et Humanisme [Colibris], an 'international movement for earth and humanism'. Since then, more than two million people have been involved in Colibris' place-based projects and encounters, and more than 100 groups have been launched. These aim in different ways to create ecological and socially ways to organize daily life. A plethora of initiatives includes AMAPs [community supported agriculture schemes]; apiaries; ecological building workshops; shared gardens; and other educational activities.

[This film, as an example, is about citizens of Rennes developing their own climate plan. It's not dissimilar to the Energy Decent Action Plans being pioneered by the Transition Towns movement].

The idea of the 'campaign without a candidate' is to demonstrate to French citizens that an alternative to politics-as-usual is possible. Describing the campaign as an "insurrection of the conscience", Rabhi explains that the campaign is not about reforming present society with its 'banal consumption' and 'pervasive fear'. Rather, it is about accelerating the emergence of its replacement.

The Colibris campaign is based on a Charter for the Earth and Humanity'. The Charter first outlines five existential challenges: 'The Disaster of Chemical Agriculture'; 'Humanity has Failed Humanism'; 'Disconnection between Humans and Nature'; 'The Myth of Unlimited Growth'; 'The Powerless at the Mercy of Money'. It then proposes six responses to these challenges: 'Embody Utopia'; 'Happy Sobriety'; 'Femininity at the Heart of Change'; 'Agroecology as Indispenable Alternative'; 'Earth and Humanism are One'; 'Re-localization of the Economy'; 'Another Education'.