“Human Scale: A New Look at the Classic Case for a Decentralist Future” Book Review (messy draft picaso paint throw of notes and thoughts)

Agora was the public square in Athens, the marketplace and the meeting place. Must be where the term agoraphobia comes from, fear of populated public places.

Sale gives a list of oversized overdose symptoms… imperiled social ecology, a breakdown of family and community throughout the industrial world, and increasing dependence on the uncontrolled Internet and social media, international cyber warfare, unchecked and spreading slave and sex trades worldwide; in the United States, an erosion of religious commitment, contempt for law and law-enforcement, increasing alienation and distrust of established institutions, public confidence in all American institutions is below 30%, cultural ignorance and confusion, ethical and moral deterioration, a growth of suicide, mental illness, alcoholism, prescription and nonprescription drug addiction, alienation, poverty, domestic and racial violence, broken and divorced families, and unwed motherhood (from 4% to 40 since 1950, 93% of mothers under 20 in 2015), and inability to establish racial harmony or justice, and increasing rates of mass incarceration by order of four since the 1970s.

The political order, at every level, has deteriorated as well. There’s uncontrolled migration from broken states in Africa and Asia resulting in more than 500 million displaced populations. There is growing disdain for democratic standards in nearly all regions of the world and a steady increase in dictatorships and authoritarian regimes. There were 65 countries fighting wars in 2015, Plus no fewer than 638 conflicts between various insurgent and separatist militias with the United States engaged in 134 of them and selling arms to the great majority. There is an increasing irrelevance of the United Nations. “And, in this country, a democracy only by name, the evidence of government corruption, waste, incompetence, and inefficiency, maintenance of empire through more than 725 overseas bases costing trillions of dollars a year, government-corporate cronyism, money control of elections, and sheer ineptitude leading to widespread disaffiliation and virtual collapse of the two party system, government stagnation, inability to deal with mounting debt (an unimaginable $19 trillion in 2016), insolvency of entitlement programs, uncheckable defense and space budgets, repeated administration lying and deceit, revelations of government overreach, and invasions of privacy without regulation or limitation.”

Geophysicist with the U.S. Geological Survey, M. King Hubbert said “we have known nothing but exponential growth, a culture so heavily dependent upon the continuance of exponential growth for its stability that it is incapable of reckoning with problems of non-growth”

This idea of degrowth and resource exhaustion seems like a revival of lost but true conservative values. They need to be reborn in degrowth.

Human-Scale Future

The original inch was based on the thumb tip to the first joint. The foot was based on the forearm length, The yard on the length of a normal pace or an extended arm from fingers to nose. The metric system, however, originated from the French convention in 1799. It’s aspiration was to do away with all tradition and rely on what it regarded as rational thinking. It chose to arbitrarily take 1/10 million of the meridian of the earth from the north pole to the equator. A pinnacle movement away from or divorce from somatic intelligence as not to rely on the non-homogeneity of bodies.

Talking about the oversized bureaucratic institutions, he mentions that the code of federal regulations in 2014, at 175,496 pages, was 117 times as big as the Bible. The world trade organization regulates 90% of international trading and is governed by a secret court.

Proper sized cities are rooted in the heart of the American experience. The exemplify traditions of cooperation and self-sufficiency that grew out of the early settlements in the frontier. Where town meeting democracies worked from agrarian and antiauthoritarian values of the founding fathers, the Jeffersonian understanding of scale and distrust of centralism. he talks about industrial machinery that is that a scale small enough to avoid catastrophic disasters as well as the resilience of not being dependent on a single unique part made from some other part of the world by institutions that are viable to be purchased and put on the ecological nightmare of a planned obsolescence treadmill.

Part 2

I can’t find a poem online that is quoted in the beginning of part two by John Ciardi, “The size of somg”, 1964.

In the Jack and the beanstalk fairytale the giant is five times as big as a human. The increase in size would be 5 to the third power times as big. The muscle mass gets heavier more than it gets bigger so the muscles wouldn’t be able to support the weight. In the same thought vein, a mouse falling from a 10 story building would only be slightly bruised get up and scamper away but a person would be killed and a horse would be splattered. He describes the trade off in biological building material inherent in the anatomy of engineering living critters. There needs to be a certain amount of bone mass per weight which can be augmented by the width and length of ground contacting feet. He states that for a human to fly the breastbone would be projecting about 4 feet to house the muscles engaged and working its wings; to make up for this investment the legs would need to be reduced to mere stilts. If an earthworm gets 10 times bigger it’s weight would be 1000 times greater and its need for air 1000 times greater but the surface area through which it absorbs oxygen would only be 100 times greater.

It makes me wonder about pterodactyls and if there is anything pertinent in the fact that the thermodynamics of the planet were different because it was warmer resulting in different distributions of moisture or density which determined the range of evolutionarily adaptive anatomy. I also felt this potential fundamental in balance in the workload that college professors would put on students. It seemed to ask, beg, or demand that I cash in my sleep for cramming shit in my brain.

He talks about the exponential increase of possibilities between people interacting from one on one and up. 2 people, 2 signals, 3 people 9 signals, 4:28, 5:75, 6:186, 7:441, 8:1016, 9:2295, 10:5110.

A bigger city like Chicago is no better at addressing poverty and a big bank is no better at controlling the housing market and crashing.

Between 1980 and 2013 the average car weight rose 26%. A Honda Civic weighed 1500 pounds in 1973 and was bloated to 2800 pounds and 2012. SUVs got bigger as well for a no other apparent reason then to just be bigger and imply superiority. They cost more, pollute more, and are more deadly in accidents. The National Traffic Safety Administration said in 2013 that an increase in 1000 pounds vehicle weight increases fatalities by 47% with SUV’s & pickups “significantly more likely to cause fatalities.” It’s said to cost the public $136 billion a year. Sociologist Margaret Mead said that the faster objects move the less able we are judge qualitative features like melodies or harmonies and more able to judge sheer volume or size in the short window available for experiencing the subject.

The interstate highway system created in the 1950s was the largest most expensive public works project undertaken yet at 26 billion initially. It destroyed many small towns and Main Street commerce, drove through cities creating instant slums, disemboweled railroad systems nationwide, preempted funds for a vital urban mass transit, made nearby land so expensive only big, usually nationwide businesses could afford it, and permitted to nationwide commerce only big companies could take advantage of.

Parkinson’s law says that “Work expands to fill the time available for its completion and that the number employed in a bureaucracy will rise by 5 to 7% per year “irrespective of any variation in the amount of work if any to be done.” In February 2015, the Washington Times gave a reason for a long list of failures of large bureaucracies saying that “government employees in multiple agencies and departments, including the federal communications commission and the commerce department, have been caught viewing pornography on the job, blaming in part the lack of work and boredom.“

The larger the organization the less able it is to take up information from the bottom and maintain its detail or relevant context. Cato Institute economist Chris Edwards summed up in 2014 “As the government has grown larger, leaders have become overloaded. They do not have enough time to understand programs, to oversee them, or to fix them. The more programs there are, the harder it is to efficiently allocate resources, and more likely it is that programs will work at cross purposes.” “ within departments, red tape has multiplied, information is getting bottled up under layers of management, and decision-making is becoming more difficult because more people are involved.” The information from the bottom almost never reaches the top and if it does it’s very distorted and essentially worthless.

Barry A. Stein, “the leading scale economist”, has shown that the most profitable size company is one of moderate size, with fewer than 45 people. “The smaller firms are more efficient users of capital,” The costs and inefficiencies that oversized organizations create our accident rates, strikes, sabotage, absenteeism, storage facilities, distribution networks, transportation costs, advertising, promotion, and product differentiation. Some of these costs are even invaded by the big companies, such as eutrophication, creating sickness for millions of Americans, and inviting mental illness as a response to a very inhuman, unforgiving, and seemingly careless and destructive pursuit of meaning through exclusive material accumulation. It is tragic that in the face of all these problems the creativity results to brainstorming on how to achieve more bigness, a grand solution, the “I want something done” response.

Catton summarizes Leopold Kohr’s points on bigness in his book “The Breakdown of Nations” He states that social problems that aren’t addressed at one level are only exacerbated by the increase in size of that organism. The ability to address the problems diminishes with size because problems are created faster than the increase in mental resources to address them.

“Social problems have the unfortunate tendency to grow at a geometric ratio with the growth of the organism of which they are a part, while the ability of man to cope with them, if it can be extended at all, grows only at an arithmetic ratio. Which means that if a society gross beyond its optimum size, its problems most eventually outrun the growth of those human faculties which are necessary for dealing with them”. -Leopold Kohr

He says that these ideas were discarded amongst the sociological storm of change following the Second World War.

“In short, we are a society plagued by violations of the Beanstalk Principal, the victim of institutions and systems grown beyond their optimal size to the point where they are literally out of control. We have already seen some of them, but to make the point I want to look especially at the government that has become the largest and most powerful in the world, our own United States. In general, it can be said that as governments become centralized and enlarge beyond a certain limited range they not only cease to solve problems, they actually begin to create them. Regardless of any other attribute, beyond a modest size a government cannot be expected to perform optimally, and the larger it gets the more likely it is that it will be increasingly inefficient, autocratic, wasteful, corrupt, and harmful. The United States is, regrettably, an excellent case in point.”

It’s made up of government employees, outside contractors, and indirectly through for-profit business contractors, and non-profit organization grantees who administer federal policies, programs, and regulations. University of Pennsylvania professor of politics, John J. Dilulio Jr., analyzed in 2015 that more than two dozen federal departments and agencies spend a combined total of over 600 billion a year. More than 200 intergovernmental grant programs for state and local government‘s, spend over 500 billion a year on contracts with for-profit firms, and spend more than 2 trillion on the nonprofit sector, amounting to a third of its annual revenues. Also, the department of defense had 800,000 civilian employees but 700,000 contract workers paid 250 billion of the 800 billion 2009 “stimulus” act that went to 80,000 federal deals outsourced to state governments and contract employees. This situation escalated particularly during the FDR presidency during the 1930s and especially with what many call Lyndon Johnson‘s “imperial presidency” where the government apparatus was charged with the task of overseeing and regulating the lives of citizens literally from cradle to grave in hospitals at birth and to federal code relating to “funeral industry practices”. ”Guided by a liberal mania that government is able to solve all problems, Washington’s reach extends into virtually every nook of the society; where it does not control, it influences, where does not dictate by virtue of law, it persuades by reason of power.”

In 1974, Washington veteran, Richard Goodwin, said that the reach of the government has expanded more since Herbert Hoover then from George Washington to Hoover. The economic processes at every strategic point from communities to states to Congress are infringed upon by the executive branch with unappealable veto power over them.

A running joke rumored to circulate in Washington among human victims of the mechanistic bureaucracy. Three men, a doctor, architect, and a bureaucrat, we’re arguing among them selves one night as to which of them had the oldest profession. The doctor said first that his was the oldest and exclaimed that God had operated on Adam and removed the rib to make Eve. The architect said that his was older because in the beginning God constructed the universe out of chaos. The bureaucrat sat back and looked at them both and said “…and who do you think made that?

Prytaneogenesis

The influence for the word prytaneogenesis is derived from the word for an illness caused by a doctor, iatrogenesis. iatro is Greek for Doctor and prytaneo is Greek for “the seat of government.” So prytaneogenesis is run away damage caused by government interventions. He starts the chapter on the 1041 A.D. “Truce of God”, a law that tempered European warfare by permitting it only on weekdays, discouraged the king of women and children, and warring on church land and fields. Eventually it grew to include Friday and then Monday. Once Maximilian I became emperor in 1508 he sought to expand the truce to all days of the week to create eternal peace and it resulted in everyone abandoning all aspects of the truce. It resulted in the tragic thirty years war.

Bummed out that he used an analogy about people thinking that slums are as natural as a desert when many deserts are also man made.

He talks about south Bronx in New York City that has been created by good intentions. It was populated with many favored Caucasian immigrants like Italian Irish and German. Tax money was put toward encouraging people to move into new homes in the suburbs. It was cheaper to buy a new home because of government programs and incentives then it was to move into an existing home in the city. The result was a gradual abandonment of these homes in the city and now it looks like a scene from post World War II Europe. There are house fires daily, trash built up on corners, and rats living off of abandoned human infrastructure. The tax base of the city was lessened. It disemboweled the relationships that made up the body of the area’s economy. Industries no longer had an adequate supply of workers and had to move to different areas or states. Federal welfare money attracted impoverished newcomers and giving them away of life to live even if they couldn’t find jobs. City rent control laws allowed landlords to raise the rents with each new tenant and incentivized high turnover rate and minimal repairs. Between 1970 and 1975 at least 45,000 buildings were left to wrap or burn. Teenagers were being paid to burn down still occupied but decrepit building so that landlords could get insurance money that was tax free by federal policy. Government money through grants that was allotted for addressing poverty went to “paper agencies controlled by machine politicians and their henchmen who were able to build up ‘anti-poverty empires’ to siphon off funds for their own purposes and leave very little behind for people who needed help.”

He states that the enlargement of government results in an unraveling of community resilience, relationships, and interdependencies that create a narrative that justifies the state’s existence.

He gives an example of how the mail service used to be done privately in the beginning of the country and the 18th century. Eventually the government mail service came to monopolize the market, never was able to compete with the private mail service, and ultimately outlawed the business so that the government could take up the mailing system. The quantity and quality of the service has shrunk. Since 1945 has run at a deficit every year except for 1979 when the rates rose around 15 to 25%. originally they had social agreements where Whoever took a long trip would distribute mail to their area or along the way. Plantations had agreements where they were required to deliver any mail that was addressed to a neighboring plantation. Gradually the pile would be distributed itself. Unfortunately he didn’t discuss energy use in transportation in regards to the flattening or burning of natural resources to traverse long distances.

He also describes how schooling was previously determined by communities with school houses and their local governments. The curriculum has been dictated by government escalating with George W. Bush’s No Child left behind program and Obamas common core curriculum. The majority of the time in classrooms is now dedicated to passing standardized tests. The professionals working with the students know that it has not helped but hurt the quality of public education. Local school boards have no control over what the money is put toward. The quality of public education has declined while the money spent per student has risen from $138 in 1961, $563 in 1981, and $993 into 2005.

He gives a hypothesis that the smaller communities the more safe they are or less likely they are to war with one another. He pointed out that Germany from the 12th to 19th century was made up of small states. Compared to other countries with larger centralized bureaucracies they had less years at war and the worse they did half or less severe. Referencing a Harvard historian, Pitirim Sorokin, in “social and cultural dynamics”, he describes the earlier origins of centralized large bureaucratic control starting around 1150. The centralizing process is associated with the reins of Phillip Augustus in France from 1180 to 1223, Frederick the second from 1198 to 1250 in Sicily, and Henry the second in England from 1154 to 1189, and the rise of the house of Habsburg from 1273 in Austria. The Magna Carta is a comma in his words, a greatly overrated Kurt tailing against these processes of centralizing control. It was quickly undermined by Henry the third from 1216 to 1272 and his doctrines of absolutism were extended by Edward the first from 1270–1307. The centralizing coincided with a rampant period of inflation unlike anything Europe had ever known during the medieval ages, or perhaps ever before. Prices sword each decade and ultimately increased by almost 400% and leveling off in the early 14th-century. I’m curious how this intermingles with the English enclosure acts. Just like the preferences of globalization in large corporate industries, the aristocratic dictated economy favored extending trade routes and sources of wealth wherever they could. He also mentions the crusades that resulted in the displacement of many European country side communities, and children being sold into slavery. Churches and states began to battle for ultimate centralized controller of the zeitgeist. Shortly after the crusades the black plague came and brought about a period of less warfare.

He demarcates the second period of governmental growth from about 1525 to 1650 where standing armies were established along with force taxation, centralized bureaucracies, national tariffs, real customs collections, and extended territorial control. He describes the general trend through all this which sounds like the conversion of economic relationships and social life into currency. There were many results that were tempered by standing armies. Doctrines of divine right of kings advanced. Currency, manufacturing, mail, labor conditions, agriculture, and the like, we’re all evolved from private or communal affairs into state orchestrated processes. Starting around 1525 prices shut up continuously increasing by an unprecedented 700% before leveling off in the middle of the 17th century. The primary mechanisms of the capitalist revolution were adopted throughout Europe fueled by newfound riches from the colonization of the New World. Enter what Carl Marx would later call the bourgeoisie and an ending of the communitarian economic arrangements of the medieval period. an unprecedented scale of civil wars with consolidations of government power bouncing around. There were the body wars of religion in France from 1562 to 1598, the Puritan revolution in England from 1642 to 1649, and I’m going struggles between city states and Italy. The biggest war yet between the ninth and 18th centuries Occurred, the 30 years war from 1618 to 1648. It was the first truly all European war fought from the Pyrenees to the Danube, from the Baltic to the Mediterranean, and resulted in around 2 million casualties which was twice as many in the previous two centuries and a “war intensity” that Sorokin marks as seven times as great as anything before experienced in Europe.

The third period of state consolidation from about 1775 to 1815. It was the solidification of the modern nationstate. Waving a flag, patriotism became a new spiritual act. New state proxies took over ancient provinces and held Providence over almost every human function. The bank of France was created, a national police force was established. Compulsory enrollment in the military occurred for the first time since the pharaohs. And all encompassing code Napoleon was promulgated, the first national code in bracing activities within the state since the Roman empire. Napoleons was a monumental creation of governmental power that as Tocqueville said, was bound to outlive the emperor. communal villages and independent cities were confiscated along with communal lands. English passed a flurry of enclosure acts from 1760 on. Droves of desperate people flooded to cities. Inflation went up more than 250% during these for decades, breaking out of the equilibrium that had lasted for a full century. Inflation and upheaval signaled the advent of the industrial revolution, particularly in England. The remaining agricultural and commercial economies were subsumed under the factory and wage labor economies. Urban overcrowding reached a new level. Political turmoil defined these decades throughout Europe and much of the Americas. The French revolution was the bloodiest and most widespread along with the Napoleonic wars from 1792 to 1815, which in golfed the entire European continent in total warfare for the first time since the 30 years war of the early 17th century.

The final consolidation. Is roughly from 1910 to 2010. It’s characterized by universal conscription. Compulsory taxation, state police forces, restrictions on individual freedom, and executive powers essentially remote from popular control. The national bank was established along with compulsory income taxes in 1913. Regulation of trade in 1914, general conscription in 1917, regulation of private power companies in 1920, a national police force in 1925, regulation of wages and working conditions between 1935 1938, the establishment of an SB a nice organization in 1942. Since World War II the department of defense was created in 1947, Health and Human Services 1953, housing and urban development in 1965, transportation and 1966, energy in 1977, education in 1979, veterans affairs in 1989 and homeland security in 2002.

Kirkpatrick Sale describes a three-part feedback loop involving, what he says is originating from the government, where governments raise taxes on businesses, the businesses raise the price for the consumer resulting in inflation, more money is created through loans and credit which creates more debt and a nation states rationalize more wars to address their economic issues that result in more expansion of government and shackling of human affairs. He points out the correlation that doesn’t necessarily mean causation with war needing big governments, driving up prices, the inflation necessitates the diversion of war and increased government control. He says the original causation is the government Because it alone can set in motion that forces that lead to conflict like economic expansion or contraction messing with national protections and international opportunities within industries. He says that as government grows it must expand both civilian and military might by extending bureaucratic influence in domestic affairs and arm services influence and external ones. To pay for this new money is printed, more taxes are raised which leads to inflation. The lack of understanding of this process makes people victim to justifying horrors for the well-being of their nation state.

I like that he describes the expansion of human institutions as resulting primarily in the distention of relationships. I think the government definitely has lots of influence in economic activity and therefore creates the need for wars. when wars become understood as natural disasters governments are unnecessary chunk of taxes.

Part 3

Ecological Hubris, Ecological Harmony

DDT was sprayed on the peninsula of Malay in the 1950s to address malaria but resulted in an expansion of the rat population which risked creating a more fatal situation for humans. Cats were repopulated to control the rat population because they had eaten toxic geckos and died off. https://www.instagram.com/p/B6qRpsupq-c/?igshid=ue299rvyo8d8

Malaria incidents declined for several years. The mosquitoes developed resistance to to the insecticide and the population rebounded even with continuous sprayings of DDT. The Malaysian government sharply cut the malaria cases by the late 1990s when they administered a grassroots malaria education program for doctors to recognize, mandatorily report and treat malaria cases. They also used to treated mosquito nets and interior spraying in some places. He said that the main driver and preventing malaria is a healthy population. He didn’t go into the details of a healthy population, I think an air rated watershed is important. He said that a healthy diet can strengthen the immune systems ability to prevent malarial protozoa from finding habitat in our blood. He said that California reduced its malarial cases this way without using DDT in the 1930s.

After winning the second world war, Britain felt like taking life by the horns in 1946. Britain devised a plan to address a shortage of cooking oil for fish and chips in their country. The British overseas food corporation planned to grow 3.2 million acres of ground nuts in the East African territory of Tanganyika. Scientist went out for nine weeks to survey the area and decided that the rainfall and topography and soil conditions were optimal. They forecasted a 600,000 ton harvest by 1951. The British government allocated 60 million, and dispatched 2000 technicians to oversee 30,000 Africans on the job. Hundreds of tons of earthmoving equipment was shipped there to start clearing the brush. The vegetation was so tough and rooted to the land that 3/4 of the equipment went out of order in the first three years. The soil began to dry up, die, and go up into the clouds. The oversized equipment created tracks and gullies in the fields that filled with water when the rains came which hastened erosion. Other areas were compacted to where the soil was no longer habitable for new young roots of nut trees. They found out after-the-fact that one of the common weeds that they were eradicating was crucial to mobilizing soil phosphates, without at the soil wouldn’t be whole. Since they threw off the balance between the land in the atmosphere, the rain that they expected would come never fell to their expectations. The soil turned out to have more clay content than expected and wasn’t workable. During the dry season it cracked and shrank. Around this time someone from the British food corporation pointed out that it was actually west Africa that would’ve been better for the project. In 1948 they’re worried about being dependent on one crop with this monoculture. Then they tried American soybeans, tobacco, cotton, and sorghum. None of it took so they then tried sunflower since it can grow everywhere but Antarctica and can provide a valuable oil. Then they found out that there were no bees to pollinate the sunflowers since they had removed all of the vegetation. Then they blew a whole bunch of resources to ship sunflower bees from Britain and Italy. Then they found out that they couldn’t survive this foreign environment in East Africa. At least a third of the original sunflower crop had to be scrapped. By 1954, 300,000 acres had been cleared, less than a 10th of what had been planned. Groundnut production was 9000 tons a year instead of the planned 600,000.

He says that our view of technology is obscured by the culture or society that favors labor displacing fossil energy hungry technology. Without citation he says that before the birth of Christ, hero of Alexandria designed a steam engine. He says he probably built it too. It was a fire created boiling water and a cauldron creating steam sent along a tube into a hollow metal ball, two other tubes on opposite sides of the bar expelled the steam, forcing the ball to turn steadily and creating motion that could then be harnessed. The rulers of Alexandria and other powers in the Mediterranean had no particular need for such a device because slavery was perfectly adequate and legal. It wasn’t until the 18th century when slavery was outlawed and cheap labor was unreliable that it became selected for in England’s entrepreneurial capitalism. Investors and inventors set about “unknowingly reinventing Hero’s machine.” He says that it’s possible to use technology that isn’t other humanly energy dependent, is labor intensive and sophisticated providing livelihoods rather than displacing them.

Apparently, in 1973, Ridgeway Banks invented a renewable energy source with a metal called nitinol. It’s a blend of nickel and titanium that is capable of changing its shape rapidly and contracting under heat and then spring back quickly back to its original shape again when cooled. He rigged it to work as a steam engine run on solar power. He used a solar collector to heat up water in a vessel about the size of a cookie tin. The other half was filled with cold water. He constructed a fly wheel holding a series of nitinol wire loops and set it into a cylinder. The nitinol wire loops contracted powerfully and straightened out as they went through the hot water with a force somewhere around 67,000 pounds per square inch. This energy turned a fly wheel and quickly assumed the original shape in the cold water bath. It sounds like it works as a an Electromagnetic Infinite Loop dealy. The wheel ran continually providing up to 70 RPMs generating about a half a watt of electricity. After five years the machine is still running and for an unknown reason is running 50% faster. He got a patent for it but there is never been substantial investment in it because there’s no money for energy companies to sell it and it’s a smaller scale technology. which is less appealing to our culture

He states that the geometric arrangement of buildings and meeting spaces have an influence on the social dynamics of the groups that congregate there. He gives an example of Congress having a half circle which results in a spectator experience with less face to face interaction and lubricant of individualist politics. He quoted Winston Churchill saying “we shape our buildings, there after our buildings shape us” he said that a long table encourages dictation or more speaking from those at the heads of the table. He said that a circular table invite some more participatory experience. In general the oversized buildings that we have built lead to humans feeling validated in their belief that they are inconsequential in the larger scheme of things.

Alexander Cairo at Cornell University, in 1966, published “The Bathroom”. It’s a book in ergonomic research involving the idea that human anatomy informs infrastructure rather than the other way around. In his book he goes through much detail in the bathroom and how it can be changed.

He gives a graph of the degrees that the eye comfortably moves horizontally and vertically in its socket by Henry Dreyfuss Who had written them in the early 1960s as an industrial designer in New York. He gives symmetrical graphs. I don’t think the up-and-down graph is symmetrical. I feel like and want to believe that we can lock down easier than we can up. If you think about how the skull shape invites more information gathering downward then up it confirms that we are a species that pays close attention to the ground, to the details emanating from the soil that should inform so many details of our lives.

He also describes a similar scale of city buildings and public spaces that are conducive to humans feeling like they are involved organically with the environment. He states scientists who examined the distance necessary to discern facial expressions and a further distance that is possible to recognize faces. He gives examples of many areas in cities that are still lively today that have succeeded because of respecting this natural law like the French quarter in New Orleans, Brooklyn Heights in New York, society hill in Philadelphia, telegraph Hill in San Francisco, Georgetown and Washington, Chelsea in London, Montmartre in Paris, Trastevere Rome, and Gamla Stan in Stockholm. Buildings in these areas are between two and five stories at the most because many were built before elevators.

The Search for Community

he states that the community likely originated before the family and the families occurred when groups broke off from one another in search of food when it was scarce. This seems likely to me. Christopher Alexander, an urban planner at the university of California said that “Western industrial society is the first society in human history where a man is being forced to live without… The very root of our society are threatened”

Sale says “…the increasing loss of communal life is undoubtedly at the heart of the malaise of modern urban culture, and its disappearance clearly cannot bode well for the future.“

He cites many examples of cities throughout history that indicate communities are cohesive around 100 or 150. He referred to the Dunbar number by psychologist Robin Dunbar at oxford university. Dunbar’s research suggests that a species group size correlates rather closely with brain size. At a larger level lots of scenarios throughout history show that a city can range anywhere from 400 to 700 and stay healthy. It’s interesting that Joseph Birdsell, an anthropologist at UCLA who spent considerable time among Australian aborigines, connected city population density to variations in annual rainfall. He mentioned that the Haudenosaunee people of the longhouse typically have no more than about 500 people in a village. I wonder if the Dunbar number around 100 or 150 represents a more close net scale of relationships among people and if there are a different scale our process of relating to other human groups that can connect those groups to larger groups and organize a homeostatic globally cohesive Gaian community. It may be that such things like cosmopolitanism or cross-cultural tolerance may not even be necessary additions to our place based evolved brains. The future may be communities who stay place-based and live within the rhythms of their bioregions solar orchestrated circadian rhythm. Also consider the fact that most populations who traveled outside of their bioregions and exposed their microbiome to a foreign community suffered from cases of malaria at high percentages around 80 or 90% of the time.

Hans Blumenfield, an urban planner, suggest that around 500 or 600 the ability for every person to know every other person by Face, Voice, and name begins to distend or fade away. Charles Erasmus, a University of California anthropologist summarized data on successful commune groups and concluded that they average less than 500. He mentioned the Oneida community being at the lower limit at 300. Gordon Rattray Taylor, a British science writer said that companies that grew larger than 1,200 people typically began having organizational problems. He coined a term called a “natural social unit” and defined it as “The largest group in which every individual can form some personal estimate of the significance of a majority of the other individuals in the group, in relation to himself.” Sale posed a fascinating observational question that the human genetic code has “effectively determined the limits of human social functions” by the limitations of our visual capacities. He gives the example of the maximum distance allowed to determine if an object is human is around 1000 feet. He extrapolates it to do you Claire that the largest settlement could be with this law would be 1,000,000 ft.², about 23 acres. One acre is 43,560 square feet. How long a population density of 15 to 40 people per acre would put the population between 345 at 920 people, which is right at George Murdocks number. George Murdock asked his friends and students to list the people they regularly associate with and New on a first name basis. The results showed a surprising unanimity of around 800 to 1200 people. Sale gave lots of citations showing that the optimal city size was 5,000. It’s based on the human preference for walking around a half a mile to any destination. Clarence Perry, “The grandfather of contemporary planning and the man who redirected attention back to the idea of small-scale communities in the 1930s when they were first threatened by the onrush of the twentieth-century metropolis…” The 5000 allows for a neighborhood small enough so the essentials of life, “schools, shops, playgrounds, and public buildings,” are all in walking distance. It’s about 15–20 per acre. Walter Gropius explained that “The size of the townships should be limited by the pedestrian range to keep them within a human scale… The human being himself, so much neglected diffing the early machine age, must become the focus of all reconstruction to come. Our stride determines and measures our space- and time-conception and pegs out our local living space. Organic planning had to reckon with the human scale, the “foot,” when shaping any physical structure. Violation of the human scale will cause further degeneration of life in cities.” Leopold Kohr gave numbers that afforded the consumption levels to afford livelihoods to sustain businesses that specialize in specific high civilized society commodity goods. 4–5000k establishes the “margin of leisure” to support these businesses.

I think this margin of leisure should be examined in more detail because it sounds like the feature that allowed so many humans to forget that there is a fundamental ecological reality that requires each citizen to stay culturally grounded to the ability of the soil to sustain us and the technological trickery that has allowed us to artificially extend the carrying capacity of our cities and our planet as a whole. Energy blind culture has been receptive to all technological innovations that have been kicking the population overshoot bubble down the road.

It scares me when he goes on to say that “for optimum political society only a few thousand people need to be added.” Kohr states that “a population of between 7–12k” provide a sufficient number who can be spared from basic economic routines to perform legislative, legal, political, and security tasks. Security tasks? Reminds me of the security tasks that early states invented such as fighting off local ‘barbarians’ who were taking advantage of the concentrated food supplies of early states that made them easy targets for harvesting. They also had to build walls and at times force people to stay because it was so much worse than lives their ancestors experienced where nature maintained most of the functions that techno-state folks took the liberty to ‘provide’ for their increasingly dependent citizen victims.

He ends the chapter citing a book written by a British army officer in 1898 H. Fielding Hall, “The soul of the people” He was very struck by a village of Burmese that is now Myanmar. The whole country was divided into small villages. Heads of villages were chosen by fellow villagers and the pay was small. Everyone assessed themselves and provided their own tax payments. If the family couldn’t pay another who was involved in a wealthy craft like rice-merchant would make up for it. Higher crimes like gang robbery were reported to the governor and lesser crime were dealt with in the village and also prevented much of the time, because people kept social tabs on one another at that scale. They expelled anyone that became a nuisance to the village. One thing that struck the British soldier was how they had no interest in other societies outside their own. They had no interest in controlling a global society or conquering other lands.

The Optimum City

He states that a city with enough people affords perks such as anonymity, diversity, complexity, opportunity, tolerance, specialization, innovation, self-expression, and stimulation. He said when it’s too big its ailments are crime, fifth, pollution, congestion, overcrowding, inhumanity, loneliness, political ineffectuality, and social disintegration. This is achievable around 5000 or even 10,000. Beyond the scale cities become empires. he said that New York and Philadelphia at the time of the American revolution had fewer than 30,000 people in Boston, the cradle, had no more than 15,000. He mentioned that in the past two centuries cities went much beyond 100,000, probably going to the prehistoric sunlight ecological windfall. He mentioned that some Roman cities grew in the hundreds of thousands but had no more than 300 or 400k. They were at the Empire scale for their time for sure. Apparently in 2007, half of people in the world lived in cities. He also gave lots of information on how cities lose efficiency when the population increases over 100,000. He said the average happy range was around 63k. He again seems to have made short reference to something crucial in regard to ecological illiteracy or energy blindness. He said that “a few municipal obligations” require a population of 200–300k. Otherwise, he said the basic maintenance of a city’s physical inputs and outputs and social cohesion decline or become infeasible beyond 100k.

Human-Scale Services

On energy production he waxed annoyingly eloquently about the benefits of solar and its fundamental human scale properties. Solar light hits the entire planet and he gave the dumb statistics that there’s enough solar energy to power all our current oversized big scale needs. It seemed like he thought solar can replace fossil fuel society without big fossil fuel scale changes. He makes a good point that smaller concentrations of energy are more conservative. The more dense a store of energy the further it has to travel to its user so distribution costs aren’t as substantial of a cost. He said the energy lost conversion to different forms are greater with fossil fuels but I think that’s in its next level energy nature. He made the analogy that it was like cutting butter with a chainsaw..

On food he said that smaller farms produce between 200–1000 more per acre than larger agribusinesses operations. The machinery and its maintenance are the prohibitive costs with large farms. Then there are the synthetic inputs to the lifeless soil as the source of biomass and the applications that kill what is not wanted on the soil all made from the energy intensive haber-basch process fueled by fossil fuels. He said that Amish, who don’t use combustion engines, grow more per acre than large farms. He called large farms vertical because they aren’t interdependent with neighboring farms. They only work with agribusiness companies. Smaller farms used to help other small farms with barn raising for example. The savings of community interdependence is substantial. In 1997, the small farm viability project engaged a team of sociologist from the University of California at Davis to examine 130 towns in San Joaquin Valley to compare the quality of life between small parcel holdings around 160 acres against those with large cropping patterns 640 acres or more. They found that small farm communities generated more local business, higher levels and diversity of employment, better civic services, had more lawyers, dentists, doctors and medical specialists, elementary schools, movies, hospitals, pharmacies, farm equipment stores, police, firefighters, and post office workers. Many assumed that large businesses are a financial boon but it was not so in their study. More money probably goes to remote fat cats. they said that “The smaller scale farming areas clearly tend to offer more to the local communities than their counterparts.” they also cited Berkeley economist George Goldman who found that converting a region of farms averaging 1280 acres to one’s averaging just 320 improve the economy of the area. They generated 540 new jobs, increased retail sales by 16 million a year, and raised personal income by 6.2 million because of the money staying in the locality and creating the “multiplier effect”, enriching the whole population. Another study of two towns in California, Dinuba and Arvin. They were both populated around 6 and 7 thousand but Dinuba had 635 farms averaging 45 acres, most of them family-owned and Arvin had 137 farms averaging 287 acres with a higher percentage of hired labor. Larger farms invite a demand for more cheap immigrant labor, which is by nature less place based. The town with smaller farms had higher graduation rates, public participation, church groups, citizens employed in white collar jobs, retail sales, volunteer and church groups, and democratic participation.

In regards to waste, he pointed out that smaller towns have a more tangible relationship to the spatial limitations of waste disposal and so consider recycling and composting paradigms more than disembodied disconnected metropolis monsters. Bill Bree at the office of recycling information in Oregon said that experience has shown that “easier communications, and more established patterns of social cohesion, make smaller towns easier to work within setting up recycling operations.” Neil Seldman with ‘the institute for local self reliance’ has been working with municipalities to implement small scale and local composting systems. Apparently optimum efficiency is reached when every household in a community of 5000 participates in the composting program. This fits a once a week collection producing enough material to make 15 to 20% profit on resale. The larger area that it covers it begins to lose money from transportation costs. Transportation cost account for about 70 to 80% of the overhead of an ordinary system. Alternatives to address the transportation costs are if smaller vessels are used and either electric carts or human powered bicycle is used to transport the vessel. In smaller areas solar powered conveyor belts can operate efficiently. Small scale aluminum and D tanning facilities cannot be constructed for less than $10,000. Using ordinary cans can turn out metal for a local production of bicycles, wheelbarrels, and machine or auto parts. vapor processing plants can easily convert waste into newsprint or reusable paper or even into cellulose fiber insulation. Phragmites should be looked into. apparently, in addition to eating pretty much anything, pigs can convert human excrement into valuable manure.

Transportation

National Highway traffic safety administration using 2010 data found that vehicle crashes in America killed 33,000 people, caused 3.9 million injuries, and had a total economic cost of 242 billion calculated with things like work time lost, energy and air pollution. The social costs are figured to be 836 billion. Things like quality-of-life, pain and suffering, loss of income, and aggravation. If the cost of building and maintaining American streets and highways, for snow removal, highway patrols, and traffic courts, for traffic lights, bridges, and rush-hour police, the cost of congestion, opportunity cost of half of a cities land off the tax rolls, the cost of the average gallon of gasoline would be estimated to cost $21.60. For 200 million drivers it is estimated that the cost of owning a car comes to 17 billion a year.

Sale States that the 4 mile stone inventions in transportation were the wheel in Neolithic times; then in the middle ages, the Horshoe, syrup, and shoulder harness, which extended potential tillage area of Gaia’s flesh. In the 15th century the Portuguese developed a sturdy oceangoing vessel, opening up access to new continents. In the latter part of the 19th century, the ball bearing, spoked wheel, and the pneumatic tire led to the bicycle. The health benefits of bicycling should be considered into its cost analysis for society.

Health

90% of the nutrients and bread is lost when everything besides the white starch of the grain is removed. All the Vitamin E and most the vitamin B, most the protein and many minerals are discarded to optimize shelf. Our culture doesn’t honor death, or life cycles and their optimal rate. We prefer permanent inanimate objects free from the inconvenience of dancing with the life cycles around them, human and more-than-human. Dr. Roger Jay. Williams of the University of Texas did an experiment where he had rats eat only white bread and the other group ate white bread but received supplemental nutrients. All the rats receiving the supplemental nutrients thrived. 1/3 of the other rats were stunted and the rest dropped dead.

High concentrations of humans and cities allows measles to get a grip. Measles requires almost half 1 million humans to be able to start perpetuating.

The optimum size for a hospital is between 100 and 200 beds. Beyond that the hospital has less admittance because of the further travel distance that is required for patients. Other bureaucratic diseases interfere as well, like administrative or communication limitations. To support a hospital with 100 to 200 beds, a city population of between 20,000 and 40,000 fits in the glove. I wonder how proper soil health would affect these numbers.