Organic Landscape Design

INTEGRATED SYSTEMS OF PRODUCTION

1. The standard business model seeks to minimize complexity. "Do one thing and do it well". Build a better mouse trap, streamline production, marketing and distribution, grow to achieve economies of scale, and maximize profits. If your competitor can do it cheaper it drives you into bankruptcy.  This model has produced a global market, increasing quality of goods and services at decreasing prices and provides incentives to innovations. It also has no use for approximately 1/2 of the humans on earth and places no value on anything that is abundant.

2. Modern agriculture has adopted the standard business model. Monocultures and raising animals in factory like settings lowers costs and increases production of the single crop. It also reduces the number of species that can live in agricultural areas and, for many farm products, produces more than can be consumed, requiring government subsidies and driving less efficient farmers out of the market.

There is another approach with the potential to add to the productivity/diversity/complexity/stability of the system:

1. Where any given resource can be used for more than one purpose, economies of integration can be achieved.

2. The simple example is co-generation. If you are going to create heat to produce electricity, the remaining heat after the steam turns the turbine can be used for another purpose. Two outputs from the same input increase total production.

3. We can think in terms of integrating production and consumption cycles spherically. We can design systems that internally produce what is consumed. Each time you create a production/consumption cycle within the system, it is an energy loop or a feed back loop. The more loops you can design into the system, the more you can save in cash costs. You create "economies of integration".

4. We can apply these principles to design production and consumption cycles that realize the human and biological potential resident in our neighborhoods.

Table of Contents

Practical Holism

Bridges

3 Dimensional Understanding

Complexity Spirals

Integrated Systems of Production

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