Ants, Grasshoppers, a New Kind of Economy and the Vision Behind Vertecology

Good morning beautiful world. Here’s a bit of a story for you. There was once an ant and a grasshopper. The grasshopper hopped about all summer, enjoying the fruits and the grains all around him. He looked down on the ant, who spent her summer gathering and harvesting for the winter, industriously taking the bounty into the ground every day… working away.

The grasshopper said to the ant, why do you worry so?

The ant, not understanding the meaning of the word “worry,” asked, what do you mean? I’m just ensuring that our people have plenty through the winter when it comes, that we have abundance then, as now.

The grasshopper replied, “Winter? What is winter?”

This is perhaps the tale now unfolding in America, and not in the way you would expect. We’re now hearing stories in the media about the pending default on US debt, and yes, it is indeed pending. It may not happen on August 2, maybe an emergency deal will be struck, maybe again and again until 2012 or 2015 or even 2040 but it is coming, and through no fault of our own.

It is not a matter of our stupidity, or policies favoring labor or management, or our overspending or our failure to “create jobs.” In fact it is an old story, one that some people might have seen as stupidly and painfully obvious sometime around 1600 AD, when Europeans started coming in droves to the so called new world.

So what is winter then? Do we mean here the inevitable collapse of civilization? Not exactly. There are seasons to all things; many cultures honor and acknowledge this. If you look at a human life, or the emergence of an idea, or the growth of a tree, you could say that there are seasons, periods of progression, each with its own rules, its own appropriate behaviors.

Life on our planet has evolved to work with the seasons, and more than merely to survive them. The evolutionary impulse driving each and every one of us is infinitely opportunistic. It goes beyond “surviving” and makes opportunity of seasons, uses them to maximize the effect of its own energies. The bear hibernates in winter so he can be virile in the spring and strong in the summer. Life uses the seasons as springboards, the way a surfer uses a wave.

So then, perhaps winter is not a thing to be afraid of, though it is a thing to be prepared for. And just like the waves, if we learn to use them, we can capture their energy and catapult ourselves to shore. If we’re impatient with them, they crush us and at the end of being crushed we still have to figure out how to get to shore.

If we try to force a tree to grow out of season we kill it. If we force a child to fill bubbles in a form to make him economically competitive before he can read, we stunt him. If we try to force a truly transformative innovation into a money machine for ourselves or our investors before the next quarterly report, we kill its spirit and lose the true opportunity.

In fact it could be said that the great innovations of our civilization have happened not because of our monetary system but despite it, but that is another story for another day, for now just google the internet and after that, google “Google.”

For now, imagine the street where you live. Imagine it, get into the feel of it. Listen to the sounds, smell the smells, imagine the time of day.

Now imagine there’s just one thing different. Imagine that within a five-minute walk of where you’re standing, in any direction, there is a completely organic forest of food. There are towering trees dripping with fruit. Apples, pears, avocadoes. Maybe there are greenhouses filled with tropical plenty. Beneath the trees are shrubs full of berries and vines growing up around the trees. In the shadows and clearings there are vegetables growing up in plentiful beds.

There are vertical walls and towers bursting with fruiting vines. Perhaps there are pathways and running streams and fish filed ponds stoked with waters captured in the recent rains.

Perhaps there are chickens or goats roaming about in open pens; the chickens are pecking the worms out of the ground before they can become flies. The goats are clearing the brush and dead grass before they can choke the veggies or burn. There are however no fences for keeping people out.

And somebody in the neighborhood has figured out how to make cheese of the goat milk. On the way across their land every once in awhile, you stop by the artful little stand they’ve set up, where the cheese is offered in exchange for a friendly “hello.” They probably demand you eat their cheese. Saying no, well, it just isn’t polite.

The forests near your street have been worked into the available land. Maybe it’s a narrow strip running across the front of every front yard. Or maybe it is a big central park or squeezed between apartment blocks, rising vertically. Maybe it was organized through long, arduous meetings at City Hall, or maybe it was just a bunch of neighbors jumping in on a good idea.

Or maybe it was started some years back when the local hippies just kept insisting on painting up the intersection and seed-bombing the vacant lot the next block over. Maybe it was legislated at the state or even the national level. Maybe you volunteered, maybe you figured out how you could get paid to help, and getting all the exercise you needed you realized you could quit the gym and save the $50 a month. Maybe it was some combination of all the above.

Maybe it doesn’t really matter how it was started.

Now, this is what it looks like. For the most part the food forest now takes care of itself with just a bit of tending, nudging and guiding here and there. The bees pollinate the citrus, and maybe kids from the local school tend some aspects of it, learning invaluable lessons about ecology and natural law and the usefulness of seasons they could never learn in a flurry of classrooms, building forts in the trees after hours and so getting a bit of algebra, geometry, phys-ed and leadership for free before their time, and on and on it goes.

The fruit of the trees and the vegetables and all the bounty is free.

In fact you have to enjoy it. If you don’t there just aren’t enough birds to eat all the fruit, they can only saturate the food forests on other blocks and in other towns with so many seeds, and rotting piles of fruit attract rodents. Of course rodents aren’t so much of a problem since they keep the cats and hawks coming around and the cats and hawks bring more nutrients to the soils, and with the humans offering so much plenty, they’re actually beginning to respond to our training, or maybe guidance is the better word.

Shit here, not here.

So this is what your street looks like. Now expand your view; the whole town looks like this. Zoom out in the Google Map of your mind, and notice that it looks like this for fifty miles in every direction. In fact the whole state looks like this!

The big cities jammed with trellises and wild structures for increasing growable surface areas (some of the designs were pioneered by Vertecology 😉 😉 Yee-haw!) The small towns too and the vast rural areas, each in their own way, are bursting appropriate to how they use the land.

And so the songbirds, nature’s agents of plant biodiversity spread seeds from town to town. A drought or a fire or an invasive species here or there does wreak havoc occasionally, but it looks like this everywhere, and with nature’s vast diversity and reserves and people’s vast resourcefulness, the healing happens quickly.

With your street looking like this, how important is the US default to you? How much does it affect you? You know you will always have food, and will always have neighbors. Can anyone control you now? Can anyone force you into a job you hate, that you know doesn’t make a difference? How much do the battles in Washington effect you now? How much control do they have over your future? How much does your home value in next year’s dollars matter?

If you lost your job, would you starve? And if you knew that starvation was off the table, forever, for you, for your family; if even homelessness meant just ending up in another bountiful neighborhood like yours where the neighbors took you in till you earned your keep, how much would you fear it?

What would you do, that you are now afraid of doing?

And now the logical conclusion of this vision. If it looks like this everywhere, then starvation and homelessness are off the table for everyone. Everywhere. Everywhere where everyone has prepared, like the ant, for winter.

How much longer are the neighbors on your street going to slam their doors to you, staring bug-eyed at the TV because they have to recover from yet another day of life wasted at the office, hoping they can someday sell the house for a cool mil and get the hell out of here?

How demanding is the doctor that you pay up front when you’ve broken your leg, when he knows he will never starve? How much longer is the whistleblower in the oil company going to hold his tongue? How long are the foot-soldiers of that oil company going to keep enforcing the internal memos to crush the guy on your block who’s figured out how to power his car on the rainwater he’s catching on his roof or the lettuce he’s gathering down the street?

That’s right, game over for the conspiracy in the sky.

Free energy and open source medicine are already at hand. And there are people among us who are figuring out how to build powertools in their garages with CNC lathes made of scrap. They too can walk away from the crappy job at the parking violations bureau where they’ve been trained to make you miserable. With easing financial pressures, they can begin to become fathers to their children again and show junior how it’s done.

This is the power of preparing for winter. This is the promise of permaculture.

And to those of you who say this is a wild fantasy, consider this: The kind of food/energy forest imagined here is just an ecosystem like nature builds anyway. This is how the natural world already works, we just haven’t been paying attention. If it didn’t work this way there would have been no human beings. We’ve just been too worried about the stock market and welfare-state socialism to notice, and while we’ve been distracted, some of those “kooks” out there have been proving food forestry is possible.

When we find complex alien life on other worlds, we will find in every case that it was born and now participates in some kind of ecosystem, in every case anywhere in the universe, period. And even with human beings in the mix, there is evidence it really looked this way on some parts of the planet for very long periods of time before the arrival of armed colonists who brought plagues from their unsanitary cities and told the locals to forget their languages.

There is a reason why the English named so many places something-“field” in the lands the Haudenosaunee left behind. Deerfield, Bloomfield, Fairfield, Oakfield, Redfield. There is evidence that the Amazon was, shall we say, enhanced by human hands over tens of thousands of years.

It starts, quite literally, with planting a seed and giving it good environment for growing. In a field, in a windowbox, in a planter in a treehouse, on a rooftop. If this vision speaks to you, do it now. Start saving seeds, start the food forest wherever you can, however you know how. If you’re the social kind, involve the neighbors.

If you’re the reading kind, pick up Gaia’s Garden or One-Straw Revolution, or one of the other countless books starting to hit the shelves. Look up Bill Mollison, check out videos on Youtube. Don’t stop because others don’t start. If you’re the political kind, go to City Hall.

And for God’s own sake lets not make a dogma of it; it’s more like science even when it gets spiritual. Experiment, test, see what works and what doesn’t and share the results. This is our world, not the Illuminati’s and it’s ours because we were born here. Of course that means it’s everyone else’s too – well, okay, even those pesky Illuminati – but they have to get along with the rest of us, and like Bucky Fuller said, we’re the crew of this spaceship so sooner or later we’re going to have to learn to fly it straight.

We’re even finding that organic agriculture can diffuse the population bomb.

Perhaps winter in this case, in the evolution of human culture, is that season brought about by a particular money-fearing culture going against the natural order of things and getting away with it for awhile, sort of like the grasshopper in summer. Going against a natural order that does not bind us, as we have imagined in our tortured nightmares, but one that is designed to offer and seize endless opportunity, and after winter, there is always spring.

And this vision by the way, is the reason for Vertecology. I am more of an architect and hammer-swinging builder than a farmer or horticulturist myself, but I am learning that there’s power in the crossover, what permies like to call the “edge condition,” and there is endless opportunity for radical innovation in design and architecture as those vocations take their rightful, meaningful and essential place in a permaculture economy.

I hope to spend many days of the coming years creating such innovations, to share many of them with you on these pages here, and to use a business model that helps lead us from constraint and secrecy to a world that says to you DIYers out there in big capital letters, “GOD DAMN IT, RUN WITH IT AND DON’T WORRY IF YOU LOSE YOUR PANTS ON THE WAY!” In the meantime, maybe some of you will become clients, and no matter what, thank you again for taking the time to read what’s here.

Let’s do our best to make this the world of our dreams, and we don’t have to blow up the Earth to get Heaven too. Nature really is on our side, even if sometimes, she’s a brutal coach indeed.