OverMatter

The last Americans: environmental collapse and the end of civilization

"Socially stratified societies, ours included, consist of farmers who produce food, plus non-farmers such as bureaucrats and soldiers who do not produce food and are in effect parasites on farmers. The farmers must grow enough food to meet not only their own needs but also those of everybody else. The number of nonproducing consumers who can be supported depends on the society's agricultural productivity. In the United States today, with its highly efficient agriculture, farmers make up only 2 percent of our population, and each farmer can feed, on the average, 129 other people. Ancient Egyptian agriculture was efficient enough for an Egyptian peasant to produce five times the food required for himself and his family. But a Maya peasant could produce only twice the needs of himself and his family.

Fully 80 percent of Maya society consisted of peasants. Their inability to support many non-farmers resulted from several limitations of their agriculture. It produced little protein, because corn has a much lower protein content than wheat, and because the few edible domestic animals kept by the Maya (turkeys, ducks, and dogs) included no large animals like our cows and sheep. There was little use of terracing or irrigation to increase production. In the Maya area's humid climate, stored corn would rot or become infested after a year, so the Maya couldn't get through a longer drought by eating surplus corn accumulated in good years. And unlike Old World peoples with their horses, oxen, donkeys, and camels, the Maya had no animal-powered transport. Indeed, the Maya lacked not only pack animals and animal-drawn plows but also metal tools, wheels, and boats with sails. All of those great Maya temples were built by stone and wooden tools and human muscle power alone, and all overland transport went on the backs of human porters.

Those limitations on food supply and food transport may in part explain why Maya society remained politically organized in small kingdoms that were perpetually at war with one another and that never became unified into large empires like the Aztec empire of the Valley of Mexico (fed by highly productive agriculture) or the Inca empire of the Andes (fed by diverse crops carried on llamas). Maya armies were small and unable to mount lengthy campaigns over long distances. The typical Maya kingdom held a population of only up to 50,000 people, within a radius of two or three days' walk from the king's palace. From the top of the temple of some Maya kingdoms, one could see the tops of the temples of other kingdoms."

(Harper's Magazine)

New York City Walk

"Between May 2002 and December 2004, I walked every street on the island of Manhattan. Every darn street." (New York City Walk via The New Yorker: The Talk of the Town article)

Another World Is Here: Thomas P.M. Barnett

"It's a simplistic map, of course, but the match-up is profound: show me where globalization and connectivity are thick and I'll show you people living in peace. Show me where globalization hasn't spread, and I'll show you violence and chaos." (Worldchanging Interview)

Learning From JetBlue

"One day flying JetBlue, I found myself being served by David Neeleman, the airline's founder. When was the last time you met your customers and asked how you could better serve them?" (Norm Brodsky, Inc.com, Street Smarts)

The Way We Eat Now

"Portion sizes have increased dramatically since the 1950s," says Beatrice Lorge Rogers '68, professor of economics and food policy at Tufts University's Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy. For proof, consider a 1950s advertising jingle: "Pepsi-Cola hits the spot/12 full ounces, that's a lot." Well, it's not a lot any more. For decades, 12 ounces (itself a move up from earlier 6.5- and 10-ounce bottles) was the standard serving size for soft drinks. But since the 1970s, soft drink bottles have grown to 20 and 24 ounces; today, even one-liter (33.8 ounce) bottles are marketed as "single servings." It doesn't stop there. The 7-11 convenience store chain offers a Double Gulp cup filled with 64 ounces of ice and soda: a half-gallon "serving." Surely, the 128-ounce Gallon Guzzle is on the horizon." (Harvard Magazine)

Snake Oil and Holy Water

"We are all atheists about most of the gods that humanity has ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further." - Ricard Dawkins, "Snake Oil and Holy Water"

Red, round and profitable

"The cranberry is one of only three fruits native to North America, growing wild from Maine to North Carolina. (The others are the Concord grape and the blueberry.)...

Cranberries really got going, metaphorically and literally, after the revolutionary war, when they became the American navy's equivalent of the British navy's lime. Kept in barrels on board ship, they provided the vitamin C to stave off scurvy on long voyages. Astute traders received up to $50 (about $750 in today's money) a barrel. The snag was that the suppliers had to depend on wild cranberries for their crop. They could not grow them.

Part of the problem was that cranberries required unusual soil: a poorly drained, highly acid combination of peat and clay, typically found where glaciers had scoured the earth. But that was not enough, and until 1816 no one knew what else was needed. Then Henry Hall, a Cape Cod farmer, noticed that the biggest, juiciest wild cranberries grew where the wind blew layers of sand over the plants. He tried spreading sand over cultivated plants and, lo, the wild cranberry was tamed.

Cranberry production became increasingly automated in the 19th and 20th centuries, partly thanks to a series of ever-more-efficient mechanical harvesters. But the two main innovations came from observing the natural properties of the fruit. Cranberries bounce. According to folklore, this discovery was made by John Webb, the first man to grow them in New Jersey and also the unfortunate possessor of a wooden leg. His leg made it difficult to carry boxes of cranberries down to the cellar where they were graded and preserved. So he rolled them down. The good berries all bounced to the bottom. Spoilt or damaged ones went splat on the first couple of steps. Albeit with more sophisticated equipment, this bouncing procedure is still used for the automatic sorting of cranberries.

Cranberries also float, thanks to the same internal air pockets that make them bounce. In the 1960s growers began harvesting their crops by flooding the fields, whooshing the cranberries from the vines with a sort of overgrown egg-beater, and then corralling the floating berries with large booms. This technique doubled picking productivity and, as a bonus, left the fields flooded over the winter, thus protecting the vines from frost. All but the 15% or so of the berries sold as premium fresh fruit, as distinct from juice, sauce or whatever, are now “wet”-harvested. The upshot is that the harvesting and processing of cranberries are among the most mechanised of all crops...

When Ocean Spray launched its juices in 1963, it faced a second problem: getting people to buy them. And here it created the second of the cranberry's business-school case studies, teaching would-be brand-marketers to concentrate on creating demand as well as building a brand. In addition to all the usual advertising tricks employed by food companies like Kellogg's, General Mills and Kraft—catchy jingles, slogans and pictures of appetising drinks—Ocean Spray devoted a lot of energy to working out how it could get people to taste its wares. It lit upon two helpers: barmen and doctors. Barmen, it reckoned, were always looking for new drinks to entice the jaded palettes of their customers, so it created promotions for cranberry cocktails. Doctors, in turn, were given seminars and literature to tell them how cranberries could help to cure bladder and other infections, particularly in women, apparently by reducing the ability of bacteria to live within the body."

(Economist.com: Cranberries, an adaptable little fruit)

The Rise of the Stupid Network

"Why the Intelligent Network was once a good idea, but isn't anymore. One telephone company nerd's odd perspective on the changing value proposition" (Entropy Gradient Reversals ). Also see David Isenberg's Home for Stupid Networks and SMART People

Going Against Conventional Wisdom

"People who work in a specific industry often don't see, or respond to, the changes taking place around them, according to Richard Fairbank, chairman, president and CEO of Capital One Financial. That's because the industry's conventional wisdom is so embedded in their brains that they don't notice how stale it has become. "There's an old Will Rogers saying that sums it up," said Fairbank, who gave a talk on leadership this fall at Wharton. "It ain't what he don't know that scares me. It's what he knows that just ain't so."" - When Leadership Becomes a Quest - Knowledge@Wharton (via BusinessPundit: Going Against Conventional Wisdom)

The Pentagon's New Map

C-SPAN Special: Thomas P.M. Barnett, Author, "The Pentagon's New Map." Link to C-SPAN special program with Thomas P.M. Barnett, author of the book "The Pentagon's New Map." "This work is a study of how globalization affects U.S. national security. It outlines a strategy for the way the U.S. and its military should operate in the post-September 11th world. The book is inspired by a briefing that Mr. Barnett has delivered hundreds of times in the past few years to government officials, military officers, business leaders and opinion makers. Thomas P.M. Barnett is a Senior Strategic Researcher at the Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island, and a former strategist in the Pentagon's Office of Force Transformation." (C-SPAN.org)