Systemic Perspective

Sometimes prioritizing efficiency reduces resilience. Imagine you're working on building a deck, so you go to Menards and order the exact right number of screws. You save money by not buying any extra screws, but now your project is not resilient to a single failure, dropped screw, change in plans, or miscalculation.

In some parts of our culture it's common sense to build in a reserve. I think most folks would advise having some extra screws for a carpentry project. But in other parts, we have a blindspot, and it causes us to become more and more fragile.

• We book our days wall-to-wall with meetings and appointments and TODOs, and where we can see that obviously we should have some extra screws, we can't seem to see that obviously we should reserve some extra time. We all feel the costs of being too busy, but our culture doesn't help us prioritize staying un-busy!
• We take out debt to pay for maintenance. The Iowa City government relies on new development to fund existing infrastructure (like almost all city governments). This is an efficient use of capital, but makes us more fragile.
• We order things online instead of shopping local. This lets us take advantage of many efficiencies of scale, but destroys our local businesses, which makes us less resilient to economic and social changes that we don't control.

What might the world look like to us if we let go of some of the benefits of efficiency, and valued resilience as a first principle? 

• If we all had more flex time, could we lower our expenses overall and build multiple overlapping ways of getting food, water, and community?
• If we only built infrastructure we could afford, would we be able to focus on health and nature instead of being beholden to build another unnatural subdivision?
• If we thought it was better to go without than to order online, would there be more options to support our friends directly by buying from them instead? Might we even have to buy less stuff overall if we had a simpler and more resilient economy that was a touch less efficient?

Local Event Related To The Theme!

RSFIC and the Great Plains Action Society are teaming up for another weekday webinar from the Post Carbon Institute. Here's the webinar description:

Forests are much more than a collection of trees: they’re complex, living systems that communicate, cooperate, and nurture one another. In a natural, diverse forest, trees are so well connected that they behave as a single organism in many ways. For generations, Indigenous communities have understood their deep interconnections within and among forest elements—and in recent decades, science has explored how these fascinating systems work.

Dr. Nalini Nadkarni, forest ecologist and one of National Geographic’s ten Explorers at Large, and Dr. Teresa Ryan, a Tsimshian scientist, Indigenous knowledge practitioner, and fisheries/aquatic ecologist, will take us on a journey from root to treetop. 

Together we’ll explore questions like: 

• How do trees share crucial information and resources?
• What happens in the treetops when trees share a robust connection at the root? 
• What lessons have Indigenous communities traditionally gleaned from forests that we can learn today? 
• Why is it essential for all of us to see forests in a new light? 
• How can we be better stewards of our own community forests?

On Thursday, March 26th, we'll meet at the GPAS Resilience Hub at 11:45, watch the webinar at 12:00, and discuss aftewards. If you register here, GPAS will have lunch ready for you!

This webinar is really related to efficient vs. resilient because forests are BOTH! The individual animals and plants look inefficient to us from our capitalist mindset, almost never planning ahead or streamlining any processes, but as a whole, the forest uses every scrap of energy and nutrient over and over and over again, and is resilient to all kinds of disasters. I'm really interested in what we can learn about them.

If you can't join us, you can also register to watch the webinar separately. I recommend almost everything from the Post Carbon Institute - they are interesting, realistic, positive, actionable, and more!

Mindset

I've been questioning the value of efficiency in an explicit way for a few years. It's been interesting! Sometimes I'm really like, "no, in this case, efficiency actually is what I want." In other cases I've realized that I'm rushing for a reason I don't quite understand, and there might be some benefits to deprioritizing efficiency. 

I always took "stop and smell the roses" as a sort of admonition to not miss out on beauty, and thought "yeah yeah I will." But I've come to understand that there's much more power in that advice than I thought. Resilience and patience are investments that pay off when changes happen, and changes are always happening. It's been interesting to try and notice when my cultural context pushes me to ignore that wisdom in favor of efficiency.

There are some decidedly inefficient events you can participate in at RSFIC's event page. You might also consider, rather than attending a special event about it, just noticing and naming the efficiency value when you come across it! 

Peace,

Riley

Co-founder of RSFIC