ELSI: Cross-Domain Effects Part 3

Where This Fits

The final cross-domain effects unit applies the concepts from Parts 1 and 2 to extended examples, including agriculture and food systems. These case studies show how cross-domain thinking transforms problem-solving from single-issue fixes to systemic redesign.

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Ethics and the application of Harmony In applying Harmony parameters to evaluate a system, you may encounter situations in which it is useful to have a debate in the team about ethics. Having a language to talk about ethics, we’ve found, is helpful in navigating these discussions. In order to support this, we’ve added a section on ethics and some main frameworks of thought in the tools section (4.12).

This may also appeal to those of you reading this with a general interest in philosophy and the progression of ethical frames of mind over the centuries. example: a systemic look at our food system In this example we look at the global food system in a rough review of the global problem, through a systemic SiD lens.

The problem with food What is the issue? Our world population grows. With a growing world population comes a growing need for sustenance. Compounded with this is an increase in food consumption per capita, which makes for an exponential demand pattern. This increase of food consumption per capita is largely due to an increasing affluence of the world’s population.

The more comfortable we are, the more we consume and waste (a system dynamic to keep in mind). This increase in food demand leads to increased land use for agriculture, and also usurps other scarce natural resources. Water is scarce, and its use is increasing in agriculture. We’re also running out of mined phosphate and potassium for artificial fertilizers, and without these fertilizers, production capacity is significantly diminished.

Our industrial agriculture practices also leads to massive ecological damage, biodiversity loss, and pollution. These, in turn, reduces agricultural resilience, making food harder to grow. While members of the wealthier parts of our society can eat well, fresh food has been replaced by cheaper processed foods for many marginalized populations around the world.

This impacts our global health and wellbeing, and creates so-called food-deserts, where fresh food isn’t available at all anymore. This is a hidden harmony risk waiting to explode.

What a hairball of a problem; where do we even start? One way to start analyzing such a compound problem is by using causal loop maps. You use these to trace systemic relations back to their source, and see which factors affect the whole system. In the last few years, we’ve done this exercise and analyzed a variety of perspectives, and collected research around the globe from organizations doing the same.

A highly simplified causal loop map, merely for the purpose of exemplifying such a map, is printed above. This shows some simplified major influences on the food system. Let’s have a look at some of the major dynamics in this system. Enough food, but distribution is uneven It is possible to produce plenty food for the current world population, but the food is not distributed equally.

This leads to some people having an abundance of food, and others starving. The primary problem as it stands is therefore one of distribution, rather than production. This makes this challenge centrally locked into the ‘harmony’ system area, requiring, for example, policy changes. Policy change, however, has never been a safe bet for global solutions, not in the short or in the long term.

This is especially true since we’ve not managed simpler challenges such as to globally eradicate poverty, establish gender rights, and so on. It would be more resilient to also try another approach. Limit to production potential An easy thought would be to just increase agricultural production to meet the increased demand. Unfortunately, we can’t continue to grow production the way it is organized now.

We are limited by, at minimum, three planetary boundaries on an object level: a depletion of concentrated phosphate and potassium used in artificial fertilizer), depletion of agricultural land, and the decreasing biodiversity through agriculture. Water is also becoming a major issue in many countries in the world, and agriculture uses more than 80% of it globally.

All of this limits our capacity for scaling up current production. Sustainable production needs to reduce water use, reduce land use, eliminate fossil fertilizer use, and increase biodiversity rather than harm it. The reality of monocultures One of the prime causal sources of the global food problem is a strategy we have steered our agricultural production industry into: monoculture production.

In principle, growing food is a productive use of natural resources. This doesn’t have to be harmful. However, to boost our production we resorted to monocultures, which means growing a single crop over a large area. During the industrial revolution we sought ways to boost our food production, and monocultures were the answer we chose, globally.

Once we entered that pathway, it was hard to go back, and the scale of farming has been increasing ever since. In SiD language, monoculture agriculture is a perfect example of an extreme case of increasing efficiency and centrality, by means of reducing diversity. This has as a consequence that the system is unbalanced to become extremely non-resilient and non-autonomous.

Monocultures also separate themselves from their natural context, which is essential to their (one-directional) success, however ultimately makes the agricultural system behave more like a machine than a natural cycle. As a result, monocultures show all kinds of associated systemic issues. As the agricultural system is increasingly under pressure, these issues are coming to light.

For example, because monocultures have the same crop planted over large areas, the same nutrients are taken up from the soil, and are not naturally replenished. In a diverse ecosystem, this would happen naturally. Therefore, this requires artificial fertilizers to replenish them. Because these large single cropped areas are a walhalla for pests that like those plants, these pests flourish and multiply in monoculture areas.

Integration in Practice

To counter this, the industry makes heavy use of pesticides. These then also kill other (beneficial) creatures, which reduces biodiversity, and causes environmental damage. This damage in turn reduces the resilience of the ecosystem, reducing the capacity for natural pest control, and reducing soil fertility. Consequentially, this negatively affects production and yield.

Some of these relations are expressed in the causal loop diagram above, showing that biodiversity loss and monoculture agriculture have a negative feedback loop that reinforce each other. Monocultures also have a large impact on transport networks. They produce a single crop in large quantities in a single place. Because local demand cannot absorb such concentrated production, produce has to be shipped to far away places, sometimes in cooled, energy intensive containers.

This requires an extensive distribution network. For this we pay a price in, among others, additional land use, energy, air pollution, and time (reducing the quality of the food). The network also needs to be maintained and supported by large industries, which reduces local ownership and control (autonomy).

To conclude, on a network level, the highly centralized and non-diverse food production system is driving a systemic lack of resilience and autonomy. The system dynamics that follow as a result cause a negative causal loop that is reinforced by the system.

What to do? This is a systemic problem that requires a systemic intervention. It cannot be solved by merely adjusting one of the drivers, such as waste, affluence, or simple efficiency. To feed the world, we need to do several things at the same time: to increase output while negating negative effects. We also want to avoid all these negative, reinforcing systemic effects.

The interventions should work within our system boundaries, which in this case are close to being met in the form of various resource limitations, including available land. One way to reduce negative effects and increase efficiency is to use agricultural systems that are diverse, decentralized, and aimed at sustainably producing crops efficiently.

The Polyculture Alternative

Instead of using monocultures, we could use polycultures. Polycultures grow food in diverse natural systems, by making use of ecosystem services and symbiotic effects between species. Some examples of polycultures are permaculture, and agroforestry. Another contribution to solving some of the systemic issues is to design locally closed loops of energy and material cycles between production, distribution, consumption, and the re-use of waste.

This reduces resource use significantly, and lowers environmental damage, which result in a boost to autonomy. Polycultures also naturally use seasonal variability, and local climate niches to provide for a diversity of food throughout the year.

This aspect also engages consumer awareness, expectation, and appreciation. This is another relevant topic that we won’t go into here, but is worthwhile investigating as a systemic driver. Polyculture systems such as permaculture are tried and tested on small scales, but they are not used to provide large scale food production on an industrial level.

There’s still much to learn on how to achieve this. Currently, Polycultures demand all manual labor, which is inhibitive to the efficiency needed. There are promising developments in robot automation which hopefully negate that argument, such as the Pixelfarming project in the Netherlands. With Pixelfarming, a farming robot can plant and maintain polycultures.

Example: Polydome As a result of the insight that polycultures provide a major improvement opportunity, Except invested in the development of a professional polyculture agriculture system. It is focused on greenhouse production, and it’s called Polydome. A team of scientists, designers, and developers built up a database of knowledge from existing polyculture efforts, and from this Except developed a concept for efficient polyculture production in greenhouses.

The aim is to grow efficiently using no pesticides or artificial fertilizers. As a polyculture, it produces a wide variety of food, and recycles wastes from the community back into the system. It’s designed as a biodiverse and highly productive agriculture system that helps with a part of this global food challenge.

As great as it may sound, it is still in its infancy. It provides hope, but there is a long way to go before polycultures become a competitor to current industrialized food systems. In addition to polyculture’s early development state, we need more solutions to tackle the problem. Some crops cannot be grown in polycultures, such as cereals.

For these, organic production, with crop rotations and other means of production without artificial fertilizer is required. Decentralizing production of these crops is also important, and to design these in closed resource loops as well. The result of these measures is a lower output of production, but at least a sustainable one.

As a direction of development, this has a potential to be a significant answer, but mature solutions are not there at the moment. There’s many questions and challenges left for this direction. Change in diets So far, we’ve only discussed agricultural systems in general. However, the nature of different agricultural systems differ drastically.

In our diet, we see a vastly different impact depending on what we eat. By now, most people know that animal products are generally more impactful than vegetables (see diagram on the next page). The general rule of thumb is, the larger the animal, the higher the impact. This difference is significant, with a kilo of beef having nearly ten times the negative impact in land use and CO

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Takeaway: Food and agriculture reveal cross-domain effects at their most vivid. Industrial production optimizes for yield while degrading ecosystems, health, and culture. This analysis continues in Part 3 (Part 2) with polyculture, desert agriculture, and systemic food design alternatives.