[bearer_token]

> There are better ways, but they eat at the profit margin if you were only to maximize on profit, yield, and market value. If the goal, however, is towards the well-being of the community and the land in which things are farmed, then there are many methods with which we can accomplish that while still feeding people without requiring a huge amount of labor. But it comes from a different way of seeing the world.

These goals are compatible. They require a government body, representing the well-being of the community, willing to tax externalities and use the funds to invest in revitalization.

However, expecting government to be economically responsible is about as likely as expecting profit-maximizing corporate entities to be socially responsible.

[hosh]

Those better ways I mentioned do not require a government body, or use of tax externalities.

A lot of the exciting things in permaculture are coming from people putting things into practice first and then lobbying for those results. Permaculture has a lot of design principles and practices that can be deployed in a decentralized way. They do not require collective action or policy-making at a large scale. Ordinary people can make enough impact in their local ecology and community, and they can do it in a way that makes sense for their locality that may not make sense elsewhere.

Furthermore, using Carol Sandford's method of deconstructing a frame, "requiring a government body" like you are talking about are:

1. The paradigm of behavioralism (rewards and incentives)

2. The idea that change requires heroic effort (something outside of you, such as the government, to make large scale changes)

3. Regulating these actions are a type of"Do Less Harm" or perhaps "Do More Good" paradigms. Those are reactions to "Value Extraction", and they don't really work, not enough to solve the fundamental problems of Value Extraction.

[kortilla]

> Those better ways I mentioned do not require a government body, or use of tax externalities.

They do if the profit margins are meaningfully lower. All it takes is a few actors to ignore costs that have no financial incentive to outgrow and overtake all of the competitors.

Behaving better on your own is nice, but that’s not a societal solution because people throw away a lot of unnecessary niceties when the going gets tough.

A majority of the population wants to stop climate change but the lack of a carbon tax means people still burn massive amounts of fuel and pay nothing to offset it. Instead we are taking this path of carbon-shaming and “do your best to reduce emissions” and it’s failing spectacularly. Without pricing externalities, you end up with assholes flying on private jets thousands of miles to give a talk on the importance of dealing with climate change without ever even offsetting their own footprint.

People are consistently too stupid and too selfish across all populations to A) have even a rough grasp of their inputs/outputs from/to the environment and B) to make meaningful sacrifices if it actually requires a significant change in lifestyle. Just look how many people still buy gas cars that cost as much as electric cars because of “range anxiety”.

Carol Sandford’s methods are likely not having any meaningful impact because they ignore the hard realities of economics. Behaviors need incentives and not using the government to implement those incentives through taxation/credits/fines just means trying to do it through social pressure. Social pressure is slow and ineffective at scale.