Tea Partiers and Four Tidbits

It started with an op-ed in the LA Times on Thursday, “Tea Partying like it’s 1968.” The premise was based on research that indicates self-described Tea Partiers are smarter, more educated, and more wealthy that is commonly believed. The lesson drawn by the authors, is that core of the Tea Party Movement are children of the ‘60s, and are “replaying the ‘60s protest paradigm.” (Nice consonance there, too!).

“In their wonder years, they learned that politics was about protesting the Establishment and shouting down the Man.”

Wow. Who knew that the anti-war protesters of the ‘60s became the tax protestors of whatever we call this decade? As a rhetorical flourish, it completely proves that even if the writers were in that generation, they were not of it.

The reality is that coming of age in the ‘60s didn’t define one’s character one way or another. While the period is remarkable for creating a widespread social movement (anti-war morphing into anti-government/authority/establishment), not everyone felt themselves to be in any way a part of that movement. Dick Cheney refused to serve, but that doesn’t make him anti-war. The same can be said of Don Rumsfield.

As in any population, in any culture, a society is as defined by its differences as much as by its similarities. The period we call the ‘60s was a whirlpool of starkly different groupings of values and beliefs. There were significant inter- and intra-generational differences. The pitched battles of the ‘60s are still being fought throughout American culture and institutions, and it is at least silly, if not downright stupid, to simply class it all as the “me generation.”

Once I worked through that issue, I reflected that there seems to be a social need to “explain” the Tea Baggers. As humans, we like to feel we understand things, so we look for patterns and meaning. And we build simple definitions. But to the delight (or frustration) of the pundits, the Tea Party resists easy description or even interior agreement beyond a few core issues.

To the extent they have a common philosophy, it is closest to the values associated with the right’s “base:” low/no taxes, rugged individualism, gun rights, purity of culture (Christian, English-speaking), and a pervasive anti-intellectaulism, a visceral distrust of people who know more than they do, especially if it’s facts. All science is, by definition, junk science.

That still leaves the question why, if they’re relatively well educated they seem so suspicious of factual, scientific knowledge (granted that the level of education isn’t exactly the same as “intelligence”). Which leads to my second tidbit. A couple of days ago, I saw a story on CNN headlined “Liberalism, atheism, male sexual exclusivity linked to IQ.” Okay, that might be an insight into political attitudes and mental acuity. Reading the article did not lead to that answer, or not exactly.

Just as the headline says, the correlation of these “liberal” tendencies is to IQ specifically. My thinking is that minds that are open to questioning and that are looking past “conventional” wisdom (more "liberal") are more likely to score higher in an IQ test. That is how the test is written.

The point is that some humans are relatively comfortable with change and ambiguity. Other humans are more comfortable with stability and a clear moral order. Some humans see the value of finding ways to work with others, other people think it self-destructive not to aggressively protect what you have.

These are not absolute categories – but then I would say that because I’m a liberal, atheist, hetero-identified white guy. With a high IQ. So I’m naturally suspicious of categories and simple answers.

So, I ask myself, what would it be like if I was a smart guy and wasn’t liberal and wanted clear directives? And that brings me to my third tidbit: a blog entry a couple of days ago on Ayn Rand and her fascination, for a time, with a serial murderer who became something of a celebrity in the ‘20s.

I admit that I have never understood the popularity of Ayn Rand, especially among people who certainly cannot be called unintelligent. My basic feeling is that her philosophy seemed uncannily attuned to the mental state of certain high-performing, sex-addled adolescents – something that you should grow out of at a certain point. So I’m curious about the pull that John Galt and Adam Roark exert on some people, and how these books describe a better world for Rand’s fans.

The article’s point is that Rand built key characteristics of her heroes on what she saw as the character strengths of one William Edward Hickman. His string of killings culminated with the kidnapping, strangulation and dismemberment of a 12-year old girl. He then showed up to collect the ransom with the torso and head of the little girl, eyes wired open to make her appear alive and attached to wires so Hickman could make her move in a lifelike manner. Nice guy.

What Rand wrote in her notebooks about Hickman was that he had:

"… no regard whatsoever for all that society holds sacred, and with a consciousness all his own. He has the true, innate psychology of a Superman. He can never realize and feel 'other people.'"

Which is exactly how she described Roark in The Fountainhead: “he was born without the ability to consider others.”

I am also making a generalization that Tea Partiers are more apt than Democrats to quote Rand . I don’t have quantitative evidence for that, but I feel pretty safe.

Perhaps Rand’s appeal is simply in the assertion that the only thing that matters to me is my implacable will. I don’t really have to explain, I don’t have to question, I just have to act to make me as free as possible.

The problem is that in Rand's world, as in real life, anybody who threatens my freedom (even another Randian asserting his/her freedom?) can be classified as a parasite or insect that needs to be eliminated. By definition, losers don’t matter. In some cases, especially in this culture, it comes to guns.

So perhaps part of our fascination, based on what some Tea Baggers are saying about dealing with traitors/progressives/liberals and keeping a gun close by, is that the rest of us want some warning if they do go off.

I also do expect that there are few Tea Partiers that are really down with the entire Randian superman sociopath thing. Most of us are aware that we are bound to others, whether we were born that way or not.

So the whole Tea Party-Rand thing was echoing in my head for a while, and I found the fourth tidbit of the title, in an article by Niall Ferguson titled Complexity and Collapse. The article itself is worth reading – a warning about the propensity of great civilizations to collapse in a metaphorical heartbeat. But the thing that spoke to me and helped me sort out my TP questions was the reference to an influential article written in the ‘60s by historian Richard Hofstadter: “The Paranoid Style in American Politics.”

As a general description, “paranoid” seems to describe a lot of the rhetoric coming from the TPers, but Hofstadter gets more specific, for example:

“I call it the paranoid style simply because no other word adequately evokes the sense of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy that I have in mind.”

 “… [The paranoid mind] is always manning the barricades of civilization... he does not see social conflict as something to be mediated and compromised, in the manner of the working politician. Since what is at stake is always a conflict between absolute good and absolute evil, what is necessary is not compromise but the will to fight things out to a finish. Since the enemy is thought of as being totally evil and totally unappeasable, he must be totally eliminated — if not from the world, at least from the theatre of operations to which the paranoid directs his attention. “

 “… The paranoid’s interpretation of history is distinctly personal: decisive events are not taken as part of the stream of history, but as the consequences of someone’s will. Very often the enemy is held to possess some especially effective source of power: he controls the press; he has unlimited funds; he has a new secret for influencing the mind (brainwashing); he has a special technique for seduction (the Catholic confessional).”

 The point, for me, is that paranoia is a part of the human cultural psyche. What I know of history says that paranoia has always played a role in human social forms. And of course, paranoia might on occasion serve a useful purpose. Of course, the human genius has been the ability to balance caution with action. If you never got to the waterhole because there might be lions waiting, you will die of thirst.

The other genius of American culture is our very fractiousness – it is extremely difficult to create a real mob around any single idea or leader, right or left, paranoid or optimist,  Tea Bagger or Coffee Partier. That may be something to be thankful for.

The take-away for me is to remember the wisdom of Michael Corleoni: "Keep your friends close, but your enemies closer."

Waves, Markets and the Confidence Game

There is a school of thought that sees clear patterns in economic activity, especially as measured by markets in stocks and commodities. One group coalesces around the Elliott Wave Principle. 

In the 1930s, Ralph Nelson Elliot, an American accountant, observed that markets move in clear cycles, commonly called Elliott waves. His analysis identified the key attributes of these cycles -- dominant-trend 5-wave patterns and corrective-trend 3-wave patterns. Moreover, this pattern self-replicates fractally as you move to larger or smaller time scales, from minutes to centuries. The patterns themselves, as it turns out, also reflect some interesting mathematical affinities: fibonacci progressions and golden ratios. 

To his credit, Elliott did not try to identify a cause, other than a collective human personality, or "mood", that reflects the cycles and mood swings of countless individuals. He accepted the fact that the entire system was massively complex, chaotic even, and the cycle was way bigger than any individual actors. His goal was to build in a certain patience, as observers use an understanding of the cycles to pursue their own ends.

In the ‘70s his work was rediscovered by Robert Prechter, a trader at Merrill Lynch, who published Elliott’s findings and became an important theorist for the stock market for the last three decades.

What really interests me about the Wave Principle is that it assumes the dominant role of the collective (un-)consciousness, and that the market indices, like the Dow, are accurate indicators of the general mood.

In the online journal The Scionomist (www.socionomics.net) , an article I found by Euan Wilson, "A Parting of Peaceful Ways: A Socioeconomic View of Civil Wars," correlates market performance and/or GDP per capita to major social events, like civil wars, back as early as 1695 (pretty much the beginning of capitalist markets). The point was that major disruptive events, like wars, follow market declines, and declines follow gains. And that these declines are then manifested in popular fashion and entertainment (“news”), and then, eventually in indicators like peace and war. 

The cycles work in both directions, in terms of mood, in a dynamic pattern: every movement is a correction, positive to negative to positive, down to the smallest scale. If you get the scale right, you might have a picture of the next week, or decade, or century, and place you bets accordingly. Wilson also recreates Robert Prechter’s timeline for these peaks and valleys stretching  back to 0 AD.

I can not judge the accuracy of Elliott’s theory or Wilson’s vision, either as a look backwards or as it comments on our current situation and outlook. In the numbers-driven world of financial markets it seems to have been well tested and is still highly regarded. That said, I’m still not sure that it doesn’t work better after the fact than as a predictor. Or wouldn’t there be a sizable group of people who made a lot of money on this last finance kerfuffle? Oh, wait, there were some people who made a LOT of money on the “meltdown,” weren’t there. Lol.

Looking at these graphs, it’s hard not to think that the “market” is not just analogous to the general mood, it is inseparable from it. The larger the market, the more widespread the cycle. As soon as Rome started to depend on grain from Egypt and other colonies, it was pretty much downhill for the Empire. A bad harvest on the Nile affected the price of grapes in Germany, as well as confidence in the future. "Maybe those barbarians at the gate wouldn’t be such a bad change." Enter, stage right, Dark Ages.

I also get from these graphs that the trend is remarkably up. There is something that drives human beings to consume more, to have more. We have not got past the lesson of the cave: life is fragile and we are in a constant battle for an advantage just in case the harvest does fail. And the cycles tell us the harvests will fail, sooner of later. The models also suggest that this particular crisis has a long way to fall to actually reset to Zero.

By the way, other research I’ve done into these cyclical patterns suggests that perhaps an even better indicator than the Dow or S&P indices might be the ratio of employment to population. Not many of us actually buy or sell equities, but we are all aware if we are employed or not. And it might give us a more meaningful metric in this oxymoronic “jobless recovery.”

In the meantime, this constantly competitive market means there always losers as well as winners. And concentrations of capital mean many more losers, though in capitalist democracies there is also turbulence, so even a loser might think he’s going to be a winner in the future. 

And, that I think, is the driver behind public “mood” -- Confidence. As in, this is in fact a confidence game. The declines we see in financial markets are closely related (if not identical) to confidence in the future -- "this time the lottery will give me what I deserve." So what disruption are we heading for? What sack of Rome awaits us?

I didn’t find much idea in that article of what we should actually do if we do recognize the current trend as a decline. But another Socionomist article, “Sports Scandals and Signs of Shifting Mood” by Gary Grimes, might give us some guidance. Especially if we are celebrities.

Grimes starts by tracking the Tiger Woods story, and especially the point that a number of people knew something about Tiger’s extra-curricular sex life five or six years ago, but the stories never gained any traction with the press or the public until recently. He also makes the point that Tiger began to lose endorsements after the stock market started its decline in 2007. People in a more negative mood were more willing to believe the worst and so his current crisis is another reflection of the deepening bear-market mood.

In fact, Grimes sees a general trend of disillusionment with sports and its stars tracking the emergence of the down market. And he points to one star -- Andre Agassi -- who played the cycles in significant ways. In the bear-market ‘80s he was the wild-child rebel. As the market turned positive he wore white at Wimbeldon and founded a charity. And now he’s back with a tell-all autobiography just right for declining market -- sex, drugs and attitude. Grimes’ advice to Tiger is to consider toughening up the ol’ image, Tiger as predator, perhaps (like the recent Vanity Fair cover shot?).

My advice would be aimed more at the political arena. If we see this as a period of decline, then we understand the appeal of any mad-as-hell rabble rouser. That’s how Obama ran, even if he was an unusually academic sounding rabble rouser. So all that anger may be swirling around out there, and while it hasn’t yet coalesced around anything, it doesn't need to coalesce to disrupt. The wave theory tells us increased bad news will give more credence to somebody who can focus that disaffection. So, we're looking at either chaos or a despot.

Looking at the data, the only thing that really matters is the public mood, and the one way to swing public confidence is to increase employment (and not necessarily GDP, for instance). That would be good for incumbents, and for the country. But for the current opposition party what’s good for the country would be bad for their ambitions, and would be playing against the cycle. And I think we can see how that’s working.

Toyota FAIL: What Toyota Should Know, and Still Doesn't Get

I have spent a fair amount of my professional life talking about the meaning of “brand.” In my experience, everybody knows what a brand is. And nobody knows.

On the one hand, a brand is what we think of a product, how we react to it, emotionally and rationally. And the evidence is that it is mostly emotional reactions that define a company’s brand, just as what makes your friend unique is not their appearance but how that person makes you feel.

The key is, if people trust a brand, they keep buying it. And people trust brands that have a unique identity, providing some reason to buy it rather than a competitor. If customers at some point decide you aren’t true to your brand identity (as they see it), they will go elsewhere. And all the evidence is that once that trust is gone, it’s almost impossible (it takes more than money and time) to regain it.

So, everybody knows what brand is, because a brand is the sum total of what people think about the product. It can be strong or weak, positive or negative, but it’s only “everyone” who defines brand. Companies build strong brands by combining product, advertising, service, etc. into a set of experiences that all reinforce a “personality.” A brand makes a promise. Strong brands keep that promise all the time, every time. A weak brand is almost always an inconsistent brand. One failure can destroy the trust built by many successes. And it’s all up to the customer.

And so when I see companies react the way Toyota is reacting to its current challenges (and Toyota’s reactions are not unique) I’m convinced virtually no one knows what brand really is.

Over decades, Toyota built a strong brand by focusing on product quality. The growth of the Toyota brand was jump started when Toyota made the commitment to entering the US market. By making workers active partners in identifying problems and improving processes, Toyota built quality cars, while cutting the cost of production enough that they had a clear competitive advantage over their competitors. And customers, especially in the tough US market, came to trust the Toyota brand.

Customers flocked to Toyota dealerships, and if they didn't great memorable service, who cared? They got an exceptional product -- reliable, durable -- at a great price.

But now there are other brands that have high quality, like Hyundai, who can push Toyota with lower prices, longer warranties, etc. The brand line up is changing, becoming more "commidified." In this environment, the thinking is that brand differentiation will hinge more and more on the service provided. And the service has to more closely align with the promise made by the brand.

To see your clear advantage in product quality already challenged, and then have the current recall campaigns unravel like they have, Toyota be a feeling shared by a lot of people these days, looking into an economic abyss.

This could be bad. Okay, this is bad, but I think there some things they can do, in fact must do, one way or another, to stop the slide.

The obvious problem, beyond product issues, is Toyota’s perceived coverup. Whether it’s because of Japanese liability laws or attempts to control costs, consumers are clear that they cannot trust Toyota’s assurances, even if they don’t blame the company for the problems. If they can't believe the problems are fixed now, why would they buy a product anytime before they have proof?

Now here’s the point: Toyota has actually been in this situation before. And they pulled off a stunning feat of recovery. In fact they raised their brand perception by an order of magnitude. Only it wasn’t the Toyota brand, exactly. And it was not exactly the Toyota structure, either.

In the mid-80s Toyota, prodded by US dealers and management, decided to compete with Mercedes and Cadillac in the luxury car segment. Most observers thought the move was nuts, but Toyota committed a big chunk of money to design and build entirely new vehicles that could compete with the best vehicles (and brands) in the world. In 1989, after years of work, they launched Lexus. While critics and customers were impressed by initial impressions, they were looking for flaws.

After a couple of months on the market, while the pipeline was full of Lexus vehicles to be delivered to dealerships, Lexus learned there were a few reports of cruise controls that impeded braking and high-mounted stoplights that overheated. Every Lexus sold had these components. To fix the problem every one would have to be recalled – a PR nightmare. Or they could just keep quiet, fix problems as they occurred, and hope it would all blow over.

Lexus management made the decision, counter-intuitive to many, that they would move aggressively to recall every single Lexus. Every customer got a letter, hand-signed by Lexus GM Dave Illingworth. Lexus offered to pick the recalled cars up and provide the customer a loaner (another Lexus). Every fixed car came back washed and with a full tank.

These decisions established Lexus as totally unique, a brand that went far past the expected promise. Instead of a disaster, Lexus had a brand success. The fact that they were forthcoming with information only built the trust with their customers, and the millions who didn’t own one but read about it in Time or the The Wall Street Journal.

So if it worked 20 years ago, why isn’t Toyota doing something similar now? At least in spirit?

Obviously, I don’t know why, though I suspect one issue is that Lexus was, in most respects, an American brand. Outside of a few execs, the parent company never fully accepted Lexus as a part of Toyota. If they were even aware (on a cultural level) of the lessons of the Recall Campaign, they never saw how it might apply to a much larger organization. Even though every brand, at every level, has learned the values represented by the Lexus approach.

Using that experience, and a general knowledge of how successful companies operate, I can suggest some effective ways to protect, if not improve, the Toyota brand. I’m going to ignore Toyota’s concerns for limiting financial and legal liability — but I don’t think they should really affect what I'm proposing anyway. And I’m aiming this at the US market (which is where Toyota’s brand problem seems to be greatest).

First, come clean with customers. I don’t mean releasing sensitive internal memos or memos (at least, not yet). I just went back to the Toyota web page on the recall, and it’s still strictly corporate, “this is what we’re doing,” with no context about the scope (large or small) of the problem or the larger conversation. If I were in charge I would have links to key articles and blogs from across the spectrum. I would make it clear Toyota has nothing to hide, or rather, that Toyota values facts and honesty more than plausible deniability. In other words, I would demonstrate trustworthiness.

Second, consumers need a way to connect to Toyota, to engage when necessary in a conversation with somebody who can answer questions. From Toyota’s point of view, following the principles of the TPS, I would think it critical to get more information about problems directly from drivers, even if it means uncovering more problems. Actually, in the spirit of TPS, especially if it uncovers problems.

Third, I would make dealers an integral part of the process. Make sure that they know exactly what customers know, and make it easy for them to funnel me information about their clients’ needs and concerns.

So far, I grade Toyota’s reaction as a FAIL. Their current TV ad seems to be an apology from the production line workers, which is exactly not where the problem is. Akio Toyoda, the family member who just took over the company, has made some brief apologies, and asked for forgiveness. For what? This may be tuned more to a Japanese audience, but he will probably need a different approach when he gets to Washington in the next couple of days.

As of February 10, based on Toyota’s actions and the chatter out there (you can follow #Toyota on Twitter), they have a real problem. And unless there is some fundamental change in the way Toyota connects to its customer base, Toyota will have a tough row to how. And they should know better than to let this happen.

Who's Happy?

The economic realignment of the last year has been an opportunity for many of us to re-examine some key aspects of how we live. Specifically, the question of living with less — less money and fewer things, or at least, less acquiring of things. I'm old enough to remember a time a few decades ago when most people got by with many fewer things. Was I less happy then? Was I happier in the last few years when I did indeed have more things? I've done enough travelling, seen enough of other cultures, to know that people find happiness in all kinds of situations.

This discussion has had even more relevance the past week as we've seen the pictures and heard the descriptions of the scenes in Port au Prince. There is no doubt that happiness is rare in that city right now, but what are the prospects for the future? After all, much of the conversation has been about how poor and miserable life in Haiti has been for most of its history. So what should Haiti's future look like in the future? If we're doing a reboot of the society, how do we write the new program?

Just for argument's sake, let's say we set "happiness" as one of our KPIs (Key Performance Indicators), using France as an example of a country that has done just that. The first issue is how to define happiness. The French, working with Nobel-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz, define it as "people’s well-being and the sustainability of a country’s economy and natural resources." For France, it's about making measurements of GDP (Gross Domestic Product) reflect not just money changing hands, but the value of the outcomes to the commonwealth. It's also about closing their GDP gap vs. the US (where every oil spill or auto accident boosts GPD).

But there are other ways to measure happiness. In fact, an organization called the World Values Society (WVS) has been looking at this issue and compiling data going back to the 1947 (the data referred to below can be found at the WVS website) . They have developed a continuum of Survival-WellBeing (SWB) as one way to measure basic contentment: "Is my life about staying alive or about getting the most out of what's available to me?" Where you fall on that continuum is where you say it is, your perception. The wealth metric is an entirely different issue, the other axis in a graph. 

When GDP-per-capita is graphed against SWB it turns out GDP has little correlation to a sense of well-being. For example, Colombia and Albania have very similar GDP-per-capita, but are virtually on opposite ends of the SWB scale. Colombia and Mexico also rank higher in WellBeing than the USA, at the opposite end of the GDP scale. At the same time, almost all the low scoring SWB nations are also low in GDP. And the high GDP correlates with higher SWB scores. So, greater wealth does bring greater security, but happiness exists across the spectrum of income.

WSV has validated nine key variables that it tracks: subjective well-being, happiness, life satisfaction, GPD per capita, level of democracy, strength of religiosity, level of national pride, tolerance of outgroups, and sense of free choice. From these they compile profiles describing Subjective Well-being, Happiness, or Life satisfaction. For my purposes, I'll lump these profiles together as "satisfaction."

Of those indicators, the one most strongly identified with Satisfaction turns out to be the sense of free choice, specifically in terms of the general sense of freedom in the society. That sense of freedom is also connected to a general sense of tolerance. All in all, as the sense of personal control rises, so does satisfaction.

There is one other factor that seems to matter — the sense of community, or connection. That seems to me to be one key explanation why poorer countries like Mexico or Columbia rate so highly in the WellBeing. Sense of community, when it reinforces ethnic or religious stereotypes may also link to the kind of pride that is less tolerant of “others.” Nonetheless, a culture that combines inclusiveness with connection would be on the road to a new level of satisfaction, and perhaps even “happiness.”

A model for this might be cultures like Sweden or Denmark, which rate higher in WellBeing than the US, or France or Germany for that matter, even though GDP-per-capita is somewhat lower. Those Scandinavian cultures also seem to me to have embraced one other key factor that I think is key to civil happiness: fairness, especially in social areas like income disparities, access to health care and education, and so on.

The current economic reshuffling may give us an opportunity, individually or as a society, to reconsider how we proceed from here. The primary obstacle I see to a more sane, let alone happy, commonwealth is the rising oligarchy in the US, and the growing gulf between the few winners at the corporate/financial casino and the rest of us. Fairness has been overwhelmed by enlightened self-interest and the fiction of efficient markets, at least at this time, in this place.

The larger American culture is deeply entwined in its own stunted mythology: rugged individualism battling with social entanglement, protestant certainty at war with cosmopolitan questioning, I opposed to Thou. If we are to forge our own conditions of wellbeing-as-happiness we will have to do it on some smaller, more personal scale, in the nooks and crannies of the larger society. We will tend our oranges and make our own worlds the best they can possibly be, in this world of infinite personal possibilities.

Green Shoots

While I'm pretty convinced that the general arc of our political/social/economic history is bending toward decline, if not outright disaster, I have not stopped looking for things that provide reasons for hope, on at least the individual scale. From time to time I hope to refer to those things in these blogs, and this posting will look at two examples: a look at how farmers in Africa's drought-stricken Sahel are using traditional techniques to re-green their land, and a way to use a plentiful, non-uranium, vastly cleaner fuel source for nuclear power-generation.

The Sahel, stretching the width of Africa, has been a poster child for desertification, especially in the west. It has been for most of human history a transition zone between the tropics and the Sahara, with a mix of pastoral herders and farmers finding a way to coexist on marginal rainfall. Historically prone to variations in rainfall, the long-term drought that began in the early 1980s can be seen as an early manifestation of global climate change. Couple that with the political upheavals that have unsettled whole populations and cultures, and over the last few decades the images of the Sahel burned into our minds were of starving cattle and camels, and dust blowing through bedraggled villages. Many countries of the region put in place laws and programs designed to criminalize tree cutting and to reforest the area with plantings. Nothing seemed able to slow the growth of the desert and the retreat of the trees.

An article in the December 7 issue of The Nation paints a somewhat different picture. It looks at the experience of local farmers who have applied an old approach, and learned some unexpected lessons. Farmers in that area used to dig pits, called zais, to collect and concentrate rainwater. A few modern farmers did the same, and some did something that made sense to them -- adding manure to the pit. The fertilizer and water definitely added fertility to the millet and sorghum, but the farmers also found that tiny trees also sprouted in the pits. And, as the trees grew, the crop yields also increased, and the practice spread.

In fact, enough farmers have learned from this experience that large parts of the Sahel are showing up on satellite images as newly green, while neighboring land, often in areas that get even more rain, is showing more and more brown. And this is where it gets really interesting. By and large, those countries that tried to halt deforestation by making trees public property and outlawing tree-cutting are also the countries that are still losing trees. Large-scale tree-planting programs have also proven ineffective.

One of the key changes in farming practice was giving ownership of trees back to the landowners -- "They stopped seeing trees as weeds and started seeing them as assets." At the same time, the success of "farmer managed natural regeneration" made the case that changing their environment was really possible and more and more farmers adopted the practices.

The article quotes Chris Reij, a Dutch geogrpaher who has worked in the region for 30 years, as saying,

"This is probably the largest positive environmental transformation in the Sahel and perhaps in all Africa."

The article also makes the point that the farmers are not planting trees. They are protecting the trees that grow naturally when they use manure to fertilize their soils. To me, it's a perfect example of working inside a natural system -- all the parts (people, animals, plants and environment)  work together. Whereas about 80% of planted trees die, the ones that naturally sprout are from parents that have already adapted in that environment. And they're free.

Just to be clear, these new-old techniques would not have spread through the area without the support of large organizations, both governmental and NGOs. But it is not a top-down "program", driven by "experts" with money, like other well-meaning but ineffective (or worse) programs like the Millenium Villages Project. But maybe even the big boys will start to pay attention. Especially when it's becoming visible from space.

On the energy side, there's an article in the January Wired that identifies a proven way to generate power from a nuclear reaction that does not rquire uranium, and produces less waste, with a half life of decades rather than milennia.

The material is Thorium, a close relative of Uranium (232 protons to 238, in their naturally occurring forms), but about four times more abundant. With an added proton it becomes U233, which is fissile. Enriching it for fission is relatively simple. It can be handled differently than Uranium in a reactor, and is much less likely to cause any kind of melt down or run-away reaction. The textbook on Thorium reactors was written in 1958. Several Thorium reactors have been built and operated in the past, and currently Russia, Dubai, India (at least) are considering or planning Thorium reactors.

There are certainly technical challenges to building a Liquid Flouride Thorium (LFT) reactor (considered the most efficient approach). It will take a large investment and the time to test the design, which needs to stand up to the corrosive salts that control the reaction. But there are clear benefits, as well. Compared to a Uranium-Fueled Light Water reactor, an LFT reactor requires 0.4% of the fuel, at 0.2% of the cost, on 1% of the footprint, to produce the same amount of energy. And it produces a small fraction of the waste, which itself has a much shorter half-life -- decades rather than millennia. It may seem like a no-brainer, but ....

It's worth remembering that one reason we (and the Russians, et al.) went down the Uranium path was because we wanted that dangerous stuff. Nuclear power meant nuclear weapons. And we had a lot of Uranium lying around, and a lock on the technology. Today Uranium is getting scarcer and there are a lot of other players who like the idea of nuclear power, and not just for light bulbs. And we still don't have a way to dispose of the waste. At the same time, we are polluting the planet with the by-products of fossil-fuel-fired generating plants. So maybe it's time to rethink this.

In fact, in 2008, the unlikely bedfellows of Senator Harry Reid (D-Nevada) and Senator Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) introduced the Thorium Energy Independence and Security Act of 2008, which would mandate a US Department of Energy initiative to examine the commercial use of thorium in US reactors. Although the bill did not go to a full Senate vote (in fact, it was deep-sixed by the Bush administration), it was reintroduced in 2009, and is one of three bills now circulating.

All this said, not a lot of people are optimistic about anything happening soon on the Thorium front -- politics and entrenched economic interests have a way of avoiding any kind of change, even (especially?) when it could clearly be beneficial. Which is why we need to be aware of this issue, and make sure we are openly debating and planning for the kind of world we want to be living in.  Thorium may not be the answer, but at least we should be asking the right questions.


Both these stories represent ideas or approaches that are not exactly new, but have been ignored by those who are caught up in the conventional wisdom. I'm going to keep looking for more similar stories, and hope you will, too, and that we can find a way to share with others. Just like the trees in the Sahel growing out of the shit.