Day 7 (one day late)

Continued from Friday. I decided to to a bit of editing, so this is the whole shebang. I've managed 1,118 words, which isn't too bad. Not sure if I'll ever be able flesh out any of my ideas to the required length (1,200-1,400 words) for submitting to the The Folio Weekly, but it was a fun attempt, anyway. It gets a bit iffy towards the end; I think I may've lost the plot slightly. That's all right, though. Perhaps I will work on it a bit more, flesh it out just a tad and work on the flow and such.

Anyway, I'll (hopefully) have two "days" up tomorrow, to make up for my slip-up yesterday.

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Solving for Pattern

Watching the news these days is a bit like watching a scene in an apocalypse movie. The main character changes the channels, each time coming to a news anchor detailing some aspect of the catastrophe(s). "In the ongoing food crisis, riots have spread to Egypt and Haiti," intones one woman. "Oil prices reached another record high today," drones an economics analyst. Another click on the remote and there's someone talking about global warming. "Scientists fear that the ice cap is melting faster than predicted..."

At first the characters dismiss the events as coincidences. They fail to see the larger picture, to see that all the events are connected and that the world as they know it is coming to an end. Then slowly it dawns on them, but it's too late to change anything; all they can do is hope to survive the coming storm.

Of course, the analogy does fall short. We’re not facing an army of zombies, for instance. That’s a fairly simple adversary to comprehend, at least once you get past the fact that they're the living undead and here to eat your brains. Just remember to aim for the head, and for god's sake, whatever you do, don’t get bitten.

But this, this is different. We’re not facing a future with one "enemy," but many. And while some people are still at the oblivious, TV watching stage (whether by choice or through ignorance), the rest of us, if we're not completely insane, are probably starting to get a bit worried. We can't bomb the hell out of global warming, and while invading a country to get at their oil reserves might work in the short term, it certainly won't work for long. (And no, that isn't a veiled reference to Iraq. If peak oil comes to pass, and the worse predictions come true, there will be many wars waged for the control of scarce resources.)

So what is there to do? Many people across the world are working on solutions; campaigning for legislation curtailing carbon dioxide emissions, inventing new green technologies, educating others about speculation and its role in rising food and oil prices, speaking about the changes global warming could, and most likely will, bring to our planet. Their efforts are commendable, and will make some measure of a difference, but the challenges now facing us require a response far beyond anything humanity has ever orchestrated. Not only that, but I think they require a whole new way of thinking about problems and their solutions, and one possible contender is the concept of "solving for pattern."

Wendell Berry coined the phrase in an article of the same name. Originally it was applied to agriculture; however, as Berry indicated in his article, the concept can be applied to just about any problem. And while it was first written about nearly thirty years ago, I feel it's just as relevant today as it was then, perhaps even more so.

Essentially, solving for pattern is the practice of looking beyond the initial problem, engaging in a holistic approach, if you will. In his essay Berry defined a "good solution" as, among other things, one that solves several problems at once and doesn’t cause any new ones. Paul Hawken, author of Blessed Unrest, defines solving for pattern as something that "arises naturally when one perceives problems as symptoms of systemic failure, rather than as random errors requiring anodynes."

Well, duh, you think. Of course a good solution shouldn't cause any new problems. To continue our rather silly analogy, it would be a bit like nuking the zombies without giving a single thought to the nuclear fallout, or the humans still in the city.

The problem is, our efforts to make things better do often make them worse. In a more realistic example, consider the current biofuels issue. On the surface the idea seemed sound—make fuel from plant matter and therefore reduce our dependence on oil, a resource which, sooner or later, we'll have to do without. Biofuels were hailed as the solution to all our problems; understandably, really, since a lot of us are still looking for that perfect fuel that will take the place of gasoline. Trading one fuel for another at the gas pump seems a lot simpler than changing our entire energy economy.

Such a simplified view hasn’t severed us well as we now know; our "green" solution to the energy crisis has had ramifications in areas far beyond fossil fuel usage. Land that once grew food now grows fuel, and while the biolfuels' guilt in the recent increases in food prices hasn't been agreed upon, the fact that the grain it takes to fill an SUV once would feed a person for an entire year speaks volumes.

If less land is being used for farming food, then more will have to be found, which brings us to the next unforeseen consequence of biofuels. A search for farmland inevitably destroys forests, grasslands, and wetlands, which, besides being home to many species and indigenous people, ironically store carbon. One of the solutions intended to help curb global warming is actually causing more carbon dioxide to be emitted into the atmosphere.

Even biofuel's claim to reduce the use of fossil fuels seems suspect these days. To grow crops requires fertilizers and pesticides, manufactured using fossil fuels, and tractors have to get their fuel from somewhere. Some people have gone as far to say that we might as well just pump regular gas into our cars, for all the "hidden" fuel costs that go into making biofuels.

So obviously it isn't simple, taking all these consequences into account. Or is it? That's the thing about solving for pattern; very often the best solutions are good because they're simple.

Sustainable agriculture, which Wendell Berry wrote about in his essay, is an example of a solution that solves for pattern. As Hawken explains in Blessed Unrest, it helps to solve quite a few problems: it reduces agricultural runoff, since there are few or no man-made fertilizers and pesticides used; it helps reduce carbon emissions and therefore global warming, because, unlike industrial farming, organic farming sequesters carbon; it promotes healthy soil, because it reduces soil erosion and the depletion of nutrients. And those aren't even half of the benefits of sustainable agriculture.

Solving for pattern, then, is not only possible, but a viable way of approaching the challenges we face today. Just think—solutions that not only take the big picture into account and address several or more problems, but ones that don’t cause any more glitches. It might just work, if we look at things a slightly different way, and watch out for those zombies.

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[Edit: Reposted here on my other blog.]