Ray, when I was a kid in deepest, darkest Saskatchewn many years ago, the mainly immigrant farmers view of the land was that it had to be "broken". "Breaking the land" was vital to the planting of crops which was vital to acquiring wealth and raising families. People were judged by how much land they had under cultivation and how well they farmed it. Of course, breaking the land did not only mean changing it quite radically and making it vulnerable to wind and water erosion, it also meant tieing it to the purposes of the international economy. I still remember some of the huge dust storms that blew across the landscape or people cursing the land because it had been leached out and become unproductive. I also remember stories about once wealthy farmers sinking into poverty because, collectively, they grew far more grain than the market would take. By the late 1940s, droves of young people had left the farms and migrated to the cities to find work.
I'm not sure of what the lesson in all of this is, but it may be something like by changing nature we in turn become changed, and not necessarily for the better. Or it may mean that dreams can only last for a short time before they fade, sometimes into nightmares. Our prairie wheat economy, fueled mainly by importing immigrants from Europe who, like my family, dreamt of having lands of their own, lands that they could never have had in Europe, boomed explosively for a time but then faded out. There still is a prairie wheat economy, but the role it now plays is a very small shadow of the role it played a century ago. Whenever I've flown over the Canadian prairies, I've looked down on a rather strange landscape and what is left of its farms. Its roads define what we've done to it. Following our sense of order, they go east and west, north and south in very straight lines. An interesting landscape but very far from being a natural one. Ed ----- Original Message ----- From: Ray Harrell To: 'RE-DESIGNING WORK, INCOME DISTRIBUTION,EDUCATION' Sent: Monday, September 20, 2010 10:48 AM Subject: Re: [Futurework] Fw: Economists are tricky buggers.... On the parallel to biological systems. Interesting how Greenspan says what I said here years ago that Laissez Faire was really a method of European forestry which has been a bust in American forests and which killed all of the game in European forests. Europe's Lassez Faire forestry methods ended up in simple farms and disease ridden domestic animals rather than than keeping using the wild systems but with a human time scale that kept the thing going and carefully adjusting to natural cycles. That was the best forestry system in the world but even that couldn't combat the global warming and cooling brought on by the combination of man and nature that brought the little ice age and the death of the Mexican farming systems. What laissez faire economists fail to do is to seriously study natural systems and then to design and improve upon them without destroying the integrity of the system. Today we have more of a possibility than ever of understanding these complex systems through the use of computers but we still are using the European combination of farm, household and wild forest as models for our work. The don't work. Simple wild growth is cancer not nature. We are in a cancerous state and the homebodies (the people who insist the system is a trinkets and trash entertainment household model and not a model built on the management and diminution of complexity (such as a classical music virtuosity model is) these homebodies, theses simple housewives are advocating letting the patient die or survive in a crippled state until they die and then we can start over. That's the model Europe did in WWII where the answer to an old rotting infrastructure was a good war and 90 million dead. Why do we not consider such thinking by bankers bank-rupt? REH From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Ed Weick Sent: Monday, September 20, 2010 9:51 AM To: [email protected] Subject: [Futurework] Fw: Economists are tricky buggers.... Yeah but mathamaticians are tricky buggers too..... From today's Globe and Mail. Ed ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Taking Stock Economists and their fairy tale world of prognostication Canadian mathematician David Orrell offers an interesting view on how this discipline is losing its validity ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ _______________________________________________ Futurework mailing list [email protected] https://lists.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework
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