Moonflower Farm Occasional Dispatches 6: Budgets
Boundaries
The real hard problem of consciousness is how to draw a boundary around it. Once we acknowledge that awareness is a distributed cocreation of an individual and an environment, then we can no longer speak of “individual” and “environment”; there is a system, with no center, in which all participants are equally important. The question is: What are the edges of a given system? How many such systems are there? Is it meaningful to look for edges?
Analogous problems exist in the framing of ecological and physical questions. Newtonian physics rests on the abstraction of a Force Diagram, in which a system of interest, say a block and tackle or a planet orbiting a star, is diagrammed and forces acting within that system are enumerated. In ecology, similarly, an ecosystem consists of a set of organisms and their interactions — caribou, pine trees and wolves are considered in light of their grazing, predation, and fluctuating populations, ants are observed to spread grass seed over a certain area. In both these sciences, boundaries are drawn around a finite space within an infinite field of interactions, to better understand; the gravitational force of a distant star on the block and tackle is not considered, nor are ant and grass distributions factored in to the population dynamics of caribou.
These kinds of simplification are essential to understanding complex systems; when the system of interest is consciousness, since we cannot agree on what we are looking for, we cannot agree on where to look. Once we accept that spiders are thinking as much with their webs as with their brains, can we deny that outfielders are thinking with the ball and sky — or indeed that ball and sky are thinking with the outfielder? This is the current state of the science of biology; biologists and philosophers are desperately trying to invent definitions of extended, embodied or enacted cognition which are worded so as to keep out the participants which they believe it would be absurd to allow in. Gatekeep as they may, one day the gates will crash and a rigorous science of ecological cognition will be the result — may I live to see it.
Inflows and Outflows
One of the interesting things about living in a remote location is you become more aware of the inflows and outflows. In cities, we are taught to consider our budget, which is a Money Budget; water just comes out of the tap and flows down the drain. When we neglect to pay the water bill, the water stops flowing; money, not water, is the flow of interest.
This is what it means to say that we are Off The Grid. The Grid is a social and economic system that abstracts away all inflows and outflows from the home and masks them all as flows of money.
A Brief List
In addition to the Money Budget, living here we become more viscerally aware of:
The Water Budget
The Electricity Budget
The Fossil Fuel Budget
The Shit Budget
The Food Budget
The Time Budget
The Waste Budget
The Space Budget
The Water Budget
Globally, water is evaporated by the Sun’s heat and precipitated as rain and snow; through the force of gravity it flows cutting channels as it goes until it reaches the sea. Most water that falls never becomes overland flow though; it is absorbed by soil and taken up by plant roots, or percolates down through topsoil and subsoil, in a process that can be as fast as a few days or as slow as many centuries, filling up underground cracks and cavities as groundwater.
Globally, water is effectively a closed system; with arcane exceptions, it is neither created nor destroyed, neither enters nor exits the Earth’s atmosphere.
Locally water falls as rain and is collected in two ponds. The amount that falls directly on the surface of the ponds is negligible; the water that fills our ponds flows into them down channels that descend from the mouths of three culverts that were laid under the gravel drive that services our ridge. Water enters those culverts from ditches at the side of the road. Keeping the ditches clear, and the culverts open, takes Time.
As the dry season progresses, the ponds evaporate. To supplement, we pump groundwater from 400’ down to fill several 5000 gallon tanks, from which water flows back downhill through pipes and tubes to irrigate our orchards and gardens, clean us and our dishes, and be drunk. Pumping the water from so deep in the ground requires Electricity; maintaining and repairing the system takes Time and Money.
At present, we pump enough water from the well to meet our needs, with very little left over. The amount of water available to Moonflower Farm is decreasing over time, owing to changes wrought by the Capitalocene. Measurably less water falls as rain here than 20 years ago; the groundwater level is decreasing as our neighbors pump it out to grow Cannabis.
The Electricity Budget
Globally, electricity is an intercellular unit of account within all living things; it is discharged during sudden changes of atmospheric pressure in a process which is still not well understood.
Electricity in the tamed form that is usable by humans is usually produced by spinning magnets. The power to spin these magnets mostly comes from burning coal and other fossil fuels; some comes from wind or flowing water. Increasingly it is also generated through the photovoltaic effect, a property of certain materials whose electrons, when exposed to light, enter a higher energy state.
Locally, we make electricity with photovoltaic cells, and by burning gasoline. The solar panels that we inherited produce slightly less electricity than we use, and the remainder we produce by running a generator from time to time. Once produced, electricity is stored here in a bank of batteries, which are old and inefficient; in using it, it is destroyed, or more accurately transformed into work performed (water pumped, light, computation) and waste heat.
Photovoltaic electricity production requires only light which enters the Moonflower Farm system direct from Brother Sun and Sister Moon. The generator requires Fossil Fuel. Maintaining and repairing the electricity production and distribution system requires Time; upgrading it, in hopes of meeting our Electricity Budget, requires Money.
The Fossil Fuel Budget
Globally, fossil fuels were produced in a majestic geochemical process over an unimaginably long time scale. Their discovery, extraction, destruction and transformation into kinetic and electrical energy is the signature of our era. The energy trapped within them entered the Earth system from the Sun and was originally stored by plants.
Locally, some fossil fuels were stored at Moonflower Farm by the former owners, who were apparently preparing for a different kind of apocalypse than we are. Large amounts of diesel fuel and propane, both of which store stably, are here in tanks. One day these stores of fuel will be used up, but probably not any time soon.
Some machines (two-stroke engines, a car, two generators) run on gasoline, which is not stable in storage and must be purchased with Money. Replacing these machines with diesel versions also requires Money.
Fossil fuels leave the Moonflower Farm system in the form of work performed (trees and grass cut, electricity generated, people and objects moved here and there), waste heat, and toxins dispersed into the local atmosphere.
The Shit Budget
Globally, shit neither enters nor leaves the Earth system. It cannot, because it is not a substance, but a symbol. So technically, I suppose, when humans leave the stratosphere they take shit with them, and bring it back when they return.
To arrive at a more rigorous definition, we might generalize, and say that shit is metabolites, the products of the metabolisms of living things. This definition would be a little more satisfying if the word “metabolism” had a clear definition (indeed, if “life” had a clear definition), but it’s the best we’re going to do today. “Metabolism” is used to refer to a variety of transformations of the environment undertaken by living things or component parts of living things: Individual bees metabolize nectar (a metabolite of flowering plants), producing honey and other substances used by other bees within the hive, as well as some substances which are useless or toxic to bees and must be removed from the hive; individual cells of each bee also metabolize compounds, some of which are used by the individual bee in various ways, some of which must be excreted by the bee lest they build up and become toxic to it; some products of cellular metabolism, further, are used within the cell itself, and some must be excreted by the cell. Individual cells of our bodies likewise metabolize, and so does our entire body working together. Furthermore, communities of single-celled organisms in our gut metabolize the food we eat, and we proceed to metabolize their metabolites, and refer to some of those metabolites as nutrients, others as, you guessed it, waste.
We might try to get a little more precise by defining shit as “excreta”, and say that plants shit oxygen, which is toxic to them but essential to the metabolism of us animals — and then observe that several billion years ago the explosion of aerobic bacteria on the face of the Earth, who shit the previously rare and caustic compound oxygen, caused the mass extinction of anaerobic bacteria, now found only in relict populations in places safe from oxygen pollution like deep sea vents, human guts, and the tanks of nuclear reactors. We might even observe in passing that, prior to this first and most terrible mass extinction event, iron was commonly found on the Earth’s surface, and was black in color, because rust was unknown.
Anyway, moving on; locally we do not import shit, we produce it. Not from scratch! Like electricity, it is a transformation. We also do not export it. Quite the opposite, we guard it jealously. We stockpile it in five-gallon buckets for a few months to mellow, and then add it, layered with dry plant matter, to the compost pile; after a year it is spread on the garden plots, and the cycle continues. Whether two people and our assorted livestock produce enough nutrients to cultivate enough food to keep the two of us alive is an open question; when you visit, please shit in the buckets, don’t go off in the woods.
Hoisting around and managing poop buckets and compost takes Time. In the first months of this experiment, we were often short of buckets, but now we have enough to clean, disinfect in the sun, and reuse.
The Food Budget
Globally, food enters the Earth system as sunlight. Plants (and blue-green algae) eat it directly; herbivorous animals (and fungi) eat plants; omnivorous and carnivorous animals (and fungi) eat animals. Plants, however, can only use the red and blue ends of the spectrum. About 29% of the sunlight that reaches Earth is reflected back into space; of the remainder, the vast majority is absorbed by land and sea and radiated as heat.
Locally, the plants that live here, as well as those we plant as food crops, get their food direct from the Sun. As for us, we grow some of our food, but import most of it. In addition to diesel fuel, the former owners of this property were stockpiling beans and grains, some of which we feed to our chickens, ducks and geese, whose eggs and bodies we eat in turn.
Buying food requires Money. Growing food requires Time. Were there enough time, we would grow more, and buy less, of our food.
The Time Budget
Globally, time doesn’t go or come. It is, rather, a shape. Relativistically, the universe is best thought of as a four-dimensional shape, with three dimensions of space and one of time. The universe’s shape is currently thought to be an infinite hypercone, signifying eternal expansion in time — but I anticipate revisions to this.
Locally, time enters Moonflower Farm as cycles of light and dark, work and rest, heat and cold, life and death. Summer days have many hours of daylight, but half or more are too hot to do any work in; Winter days are short and rainy. If you want to think about it this way, a certain number of seconds are issued to each of us at birth, and we proceed to use time, kill time, borrow time, waste time, until, one day, there is no more. Fucking, arguing, meditating, washing dishes, tending the garden, cooking and eating, writing these notes, sleeping: All take time.
The Money Budget
Similar to shit, money is a human symbol. It neither enters nor exits the Earth system unless we do. It is a polyvalent symbol, standing for both a unit of account and a store of value.
The standard narrative of the historical development of money — that it began as cowry shells or other counters used in exchange — is one of those anthropological myths that was invented to explain a contemporary phenomenon and is repeated despite there being no evidence that is true, as David Graeber convincingly argues in Debt: The First 5000 Years. Graeber suggests that humans are actually very good, within reasonably-sized communities, at keeping track of favors owed; it is only for trade far outside the community that a unit of account is needed. Historically, money was only needed where trust was impossible. Wherever the centralized state develops, however, money appears, as a tool of state repression and control.
With the dawn of capitalism, of course, money undergoes another transformation, into a distributed lever of alienation and hyper-fetishized ur-commodity, which you can read all about in Marx’s Capital and I suggest you do.
On the psychology of money: In a former chapter of my life I was romantically involved with someone from a different, higher, social stratum, who had attended Stanford University based on “legacy admission”, because her uncle or somebody was a donor. She had a therapist, whom she had apparently chosen solely on the basis of their shared status as Stanford alumnae. My relationship to money was incomprehensible to my partner, and at a certain point she asked if I would have a session with her therapist, to discuss it. This estimable lady lectured me on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, and gave me a somewhat stern word of advice: “Money is just an energy.” I left, pondering the truth of her words, but also how much easier it was for a semi-retired white psychologist in the Berkeley hills to say them than, for example, an unemployed Black mother of two in the Oakland flats, and what a lot of work the word, “just”, was doing in her sentence.
Money leaves this system in trade for various flows, described infra, and also for other things: Meals out, funny hats, artworks. The society we, and you, live in is structured totally around consumption. Our beliefs do not change that. Not only are the overwhelming majority of social interactions mediated through consumption, but consumption is experienced as a need, and its denial as a deprivation. In practice, this means that sometimes we just want to go into town and buy an overpriced juice and talk to the clerk in the juice shop.
Subjectively, there is never too much money. It is possible to have subjectively enough. This requires managing both the flow of money, and the emotions and expectations of the people involved.
The Waste Budget
“Waste”, like “side-effects” and “by-products” and “economic externalities” is a way of revealing the speaker’s biases and perspective, without objective meaning.
Locally, waste enters Moonflower Farm mostly in the form of consumer packaging. Of which there is an astonishing amount. Cardboard boxes — bottles, cans, and jars — plastic bags and plastic clamshells — styrofoam. In our former life, “on the grid”, all these would have been dutifully categorized as Trash or Recycling, stuffed into the appropriate receptacle, and forgotten.
On Moonflower Farm, of course, there is no Trash or Recycling — or there is, but its removal is extremely arduous. It must be loaded into a pickup truck, driven half an hour into town, and either hidden in somebody else’s bins, or taken to the county dump, at which there is always a long line of other trucks, many with Trump stickers on them. Doing this takes a lot of Time — and, at the dump, Money.
This leads to a perspective shift, from waste into what my friend Loophole Kid calls “hacker-class” or “sorcerer-class” resources. We carefully clean bottles, jars, and plastic bags and reuse them in various ways. An immense pile of cardboard is growing in the barn. At first I was planning to build a temple out of it — recently I’ve learned that it can be used as a substrate for mushroom cultivation. Styrofoam, once manufactured, is more or less eternal. It makes very good insulation though.
And the plastic clamshells — I save them. I don’t know what they may become useful for. But I can’t send them, after a single use, into the trash stream. Not in good conscience.
Cooked chicken bones are one of the hardest kinds of waste to deal with; animals (some of whom we consider “pets”) sniff them out, dig them out of the compost, and eat them, risking internal injury from the sharp points of shattered bone. Maybe we can melt the clamshells and encase them in plastic and make some kind of sculpture.
In any case, when you come to see us here at Moonflower Farm, and bring washed salad greens in a plastic clamshell to share, take these musings into account. For it is not only here that there is no “away”. There is no “away” anywhere. It would be wonderful if we, as a species, could simply decide to stop making single-use plastic. As consumers — and, under technocapitalism, that is most of what we are — we can only choose not to trade money for it — or failing that, at least to use it more than once.
The Space Budget
Globally, the spatial limitations of the Earth system are the fundamental constraint that renders the technocapitalist commandment of infinite growth untenable. The atmosphere, oceans, mineral core are of finite volume; the Earth’s surface of finite area. None of these spaces will ever change — once full, they will be full forever.
Locally, the same applies. At the moment, it seems like a lot of space. There is room enough to store those many things that would have been deemed waste when we lived in cities: Hacker-class resources. Building materials, firewood, diesel fuel, jars and bottles — all can be stockpiled. There is plenty of room for us to live, and room for our friends to live too, part-time or full-time. Many non-human beings live here with us. Vast, forested areas extend beyond the inhabited zones which we haven’t even explored yet.
One day, just like the Earth, Moonflower Farm may seem to have reached its carrying capacity. One day, we may run out of space for bottle-saving. But for now, the spaciousness of our lives allows us to think and feel differently. For now we can be both frugal and generous.
Stocks and Flows
During the above considerations, we have several times encountered the phenomenon of storage — that there are not only flows, but stocks as well. Water rains and evaporates, is pumped out of the ground and used for irrigation — it is also held in ponds, tanks and geologic cracks. Electricity is produced by generators and solar panels, but the real difficulty is storing it in batteries. Diesel and propane may be stored in tanks — gasoline and lighter fluid must be bought and used in a timely fashion, or they degrade. Shit is being produced all the time, and can be transformed into plant nutrients that are non-toxic to humans; but the hard part is having it sitting around in buckets. Money comes and goes — large quantities are also locked up as equity. Waste, if not dealt with, quickly becomes an aesthetic and practical hazard. Space places a hard limit on the quantity of any of these flows that may be stored.
And time cannot stockpiled in any way.
Relative Timescales
This brings us to a consideration of the relative speed of various processes. Composting, for example: Pile branches and grass-clippings in a corner of the garden and let them sit and sit they will, for decades. However, mix a pile of nitrogenous (poop or food scraps) and carbonous (dry leaves and weeds) in a ration of about 1:3 by volume, keep it about as moist as a squeezed sponge, and in a matter of months you will have rich black compost swarming with big red worms. Fossil fuels taking literally millions of years to attain their form are being burnt in a few centuries. Water purified by centuries of percolating into aquifers is being pumped to the surface and dirtied again in minutes — in fact its main use to human beings is not as drinking water but to carry “off” our excreta and toxins produced as “byproducts” of industrial processes. Around 3 million tons of styrofoam cups are manufactured every year. Exposed to sunlight, these will photodegrade into poisonous microplastics in 500 years or less. There is, however, no known process by which they will return to the plant matter from which they came. A hundred-year-old tree, cut, split and burned, can heat a house for a few days, no more.
As observed above, bacterial lifespans are five or six orders of magnitude shorter than those of human beings. So, for Staphylococcus aureus (to take a topical example which has developed resistance to methicillin owing to the latter being proactively added to animal feed, though S. aureus is present in the gut mucosa of many mammals including humans and can infect them all) a human lifetime subjectively lasts 70 million years — about as long as since the K-T event when dinosaurs went extinct.
One single human lifetime.
70 million years ago our nearest ancestor was Plesiadapis sp., a nocturnal, arboreal, insect-eating mammal which is the common ancestor of tree shrews, flying lemurs, and primates. That’s a lot of evolving.
The Sierra foothills, among which we live, are like a wave thrown up by the collision of the North American Plate and the Farallon Plate (which was subducted in the process), about 100 million years ago, or before the extinction of the dinosaurs and speciation of Plesiadapis. (Our nearest ancestor at the time was Eomaia scansoria, ancestor of all placental mammals, if you are wondering.) Their raising took a little over a million years, which on a geologic timescale is instantaneous.
Anyway, to begin to think ecologically, it is not only important to think in terms of stocks and flows, but of the vastly different timescales upon which different processes are occurring; and especially to try to conceive that astonishing temporal rupture that industrial capitalism represents.
To take one example: The benzene in your styrofoam cup was reshaped from lignin in plants by way of peat formation and metamorphic geology over several million years. It was mined in a year or so of human labor, the coal was baked into coke, throwing off coal tar, in a couple of days, the benzene isolated, reacted with ethylene to make a foam, and pumped into molds in an afternoon. The resulting polystyrene can be burned, resulting in a toxic cocktail of carcinogenic and mutagenic compounds so complex that data are hard to come by — but what I do know is that it burns at about 1000º fahrenheit, the surface temperature of Venus. As the Sun becomes more luminous, our Earth will reach this temperature in a billion years or so; however climate models have an unsettling way of predicting a vicious cycle or “runaway greenhouse effect”, within the next few centuries. In which case — silver lining! — all these styrofoam cups will not be around that long after all.
A Map
1. I wrote a note about this some 20 years ago which I will include here: “So let me get this straight — sunlight falls on all of us, all day long, free of charge; we proceed to manufacture, in a highly toxic process, incredibly complicated banks of silicon which use photons to push electrons down a wire, losing 95% of the energy received from the sun in the process; then force these electrons to jump across a gap between two wires, losing most of the remaining energy as heat, to release photons as a byproduct, just so we can read a magazine at a time when the sun does not happen to be shining? Is that really the best we can do?” I will note that this is exactly what we do at Moonflower Farm.
2. I wrote another note about this 10 or 15 years ago which I will insert here as I see no reason to disagree with it, except that now I would make a distinction between human nature and the economic system, capitalism, in which we are enmeshed: “1. Most, but not all, of the carbon in the earth will be turned into CO2 by humans. It will be stopped short of complete transformation by an epidemic combined with social and economic collapse which will, in turn, be caused by the rising price of getting the carbon out of the ground. 2. The epidemic in question has a simple cause which is overcrowding -- not overpopulation per se but the economic arithmetic which is leading to exponential urbanization around the world. Human monocultures combined with overuse of antibiotics will inevitably lead to epidemic disease, simply because bacteria and viruses have lifetimes several orders of magnitude shorter than ours and evolve that much faster. 3. No one knows what the effect on global climate of this catastrophic release of CO2 will be. The overall response of warming is fairly linear, and thus theoretically predictable. However the global climate is a non-linear system and thus inherently unpredictable even in the short term. Unpredictable literally means "un-predictable." No computer has been designed which can make a prediction about the effect of this warming on the global climate. The results of climate models run on computers -- positive feedback, leading to a surface temperature equivalent to that of Venus, a new ice age, or something in between -- are nothing better than guesses. These results cannot be assigned a probability, or a margin of error. 4. High tech methods, like photovoltaic cells, integrated fast reactors, “clean coal”, etc, will do absolutely nothing to stop this process. The fundamental reason for this is that humans are not smart enough to design foolproof systems. Any design-intensive solution will fall victim to the law of unintended consequences. Further, humans are only human neurosis writ large. We are a short-sighted species and, as long as there are profits to be made, long-term rational decisions will not be. This is because profit is a proxy for evolutionary fitness and we have no choice but to maximize it. Also, the non-linearity of the global climate system assures that hard evidence of climate change will not be available to us until it is too late to turn back. Photovoltaic cells, fast reactors, geoengineering, GM crops and the rest of it are brought to us by the same minds that brought us thalidomide, DDT, Chernobyl, the Green Revolution, and biofuels -- that is minds intoxicated by hubris and profoundly conditioned by greed and short-sightedness. Minds exactly like our own.”
3. In “Moonflower Farm Occasional Dispatch 3: On Shit”, which should be required reading in all high schools.
4. :)
5. If dead bodies are shit, then meat and potatoes are too.
6. Entropy has a profound and mysterious relationship with “information”. Returning to our original question about the location of consciousness: Neurophysiologists, philosophers, and many others are very concerned with “information” — “information” about the world is said to enter consciousness and be used somehow in a process called “cognition”. However, as it turns out, the word is extremely ill-defined. I could have included an “Information Budget” on the list here, but — I don’t know what it is, nor how it moves, nor whether it can, and neither does anybody else. In the early 20th Century the mathematician and proto-cybernetician Claude Shannon provided what is still the only rigorous working definition of information, which he did using entropy. His definition begins with what he called “self-information”, the information a message (or other system) contains, which he defined mathematically as equal to its entropy — the amount of variance among its parts. A message which only contains the letter A repeated 1000 times is low in self-information, one with 26 letters spread randomly is too; a message with 26 letters arranged such that some occur much more frequently than others, is higher in self-information. Shannon, who was interested in code-breaking, then went on to define mathematically the probability that two messages contain the same information, which is high if their entropies are the same, and low if they have different entropies. Two things about this should leap out at us at once: First, that according to Shannon, the amount of information in the universe is perpetually declining; information is not conserved. Second, that there is no way, using Shannon’s definitions, to determine which message came first; information, for Shannon, does not flow. The information in one system is not “about” the other system. It is as meaningful, using Shannon’s formulation, to say that the world contains information “about” my mind as it is to say that my mind contains information “about” the world. You might want to think about that for a sec. Philosophers of language have tried, over the ensuing decades, to expand or replace this definition in order to get something closer to the naïve sense of “information” as used by cognitive scientists (and everybody else), without success, in a very interesting history which space does not permit rehearsing; and this is a big problem for all sciences of mind (though one they are happy to ignore). Again, my prediction is that a theory of ecological cognition, in which information may be shared but not gathered, perception does the heavy lifting, and the boundaries of individual cognition are very wide indeed, will eventually prove more convincing.
7. Which I have written about elsewhere: A Provisional Manual of West Coast Tantrik Psychedelic Druidry, “The Circling Dance of Sun and Moon”.
8. But I have, in fact, said a great deal about it, which is why I really would rather not think about it right now. See Moonflower Farm Occasional Dispatches 3: Thoughts on Labor.
9. Dumpster-diven? It’s interesting that in English “dive” has lost the passive voice, and therefore has no past participle — I never noticed that before.
10. For more on what this means, spiritually and practically, see Moonflower Farm Occasional Dispatches 4: On Property.
11. Following James T. Carse (in Finite and Infinite Games, a book I have read and reread and which has rearranged my sense of reality as much as any writing I have ever encountered) I reserve the word “paradox” for generative tensions — those characteristic of infinite, not finite, games.
12. op cit
13. Observant readers will note that I have several times used the phrase “waste heat” in this essay — and indeed, there is a cogent perspective from which heat that is not transformed somehow by life is wasted — is entropy. It is “wasted” in the sense that it dissipates, bringing the universe nearer to a condition of equal temperature everywhere; reducing its information content. If you want to think about it that way.