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Commerce · VII.05 · MMXXVI · daylight

La Bourse  /  Volume VII  /  Nº VII.05  /  Workbook — the student

A watercolour of rolling farmland, the soil shifting from ochre to green across the hills.
Plate VII.05 · Workbook — the studentWhere the Soil Changes Colour.A bioregion is not an idea about belonging. It is a boundary you can kneel down and touch, and the whole question is whether you can also put it on a balance sheet.

WORKBOOK — THE STUDENT

Chapter VII.05 · Bioregional Economics

For the person studying this alone or in a seminar. A term of practice, a term project, and a self-assessment. Applied to a life — which means to the place you actually live, the food you actually buy and the journeys you actually make.

WHY THIS WORKBOOK IS DIFFERENT

Most environmental coursework asks you to feel something and then to advocate. This one asks you to measure your own place and then let the measurement overrule you in both directions. You will find, if you do the work honestly, that some of the things you assumed were good are not, and that some of the things you never thought about are where the whole argument lives.

The test of this term is not whether you end it more committed to local food. It is whether you end it able to say, of any specific good, which way the arithmetic points and by how much — and to be believed, because you showed your working.

PART ONE — DISCOVERY

Weeks 1–4: find your bioregion and its shape

Exercise 1.1 — Locate yourself, at a stated level (2 hours)

Find the published ecoregion you live in. In North America the Commission for Environmental Cooperation and the US EPA publish the hierarchy: 15 regions at Level I, 50 at Level II, 182 at Level III. Globally there are 846 terrestrial ecoregions at that grain. Write down, on one line:

I live in ________, Level ___, boundary version ____.

Then write the same line at the level above and the level below. Three lines, three different places, all of them true.

Exercise 1.2 — The density check (45 minutes)

Find your region's land area in km² and its population. Then:

  self-sufficiency ceiling  =  100 x f / 1.08   persons per km2
     f = the farmable fraction of the land
     1.08 = ha per person per year, current American diet

At f = 1 — every hectare ploughed, including the streets — the ceiling is 92.6 persons per km². At the global agricultural share of f = 0.38 it is 35.2. Where does your region sit? Write the number down before you look up what anybody says about local food there.

Exercise 1.3 — The three things (one week, in conversation)

Ask five people who live near you: what grows, runs or gets made unusually well here? Do not prompt. Write their answers. Then check them against published production data.

You are looking for two things: what people know without being told, and where they are systematically wrong. Both are findings. In New York State the answer people give is apples; the answer the data gives is dairy, at 255 percent of what the city below it would claim.

Exercise 1.4 — Read one foodshed study end to end (3 hours)

Peters and colleagues' New York State foodshed is the best-documented in the literature and it repays a full reading. Note the two headline numbers and the fact that they are not comparable: 34 percent of total food needs at an average 49 km, and, in the later food-group paper, 69 percent on a fresh-weight basis at an average 238 km — a figure reached by supplying four food groups of six and not growing grain or meat in the state at all.

Write one paragraph on why two careful papers by the same authors about the same state give answers that differ by a factor of two. This paragraph is the single most useful thing you will write this term.

PART TWO — THE ARITHMETIC

Weeks 5–8: compute before you argue

Exercise 2.1 — Your own foodshed (3 hours)

Take your settlement's population and its region's land in farms, and compute:

  requirement  =  population x 1.08 ha
  available    =  acres in farms / 2.4710538
  coverage     =  available / requirement

Worked, so you can check your method: a metropolitan region of 3,400,000 people inside an ecoregion with 6,000,000 acres of land in farms needs 3,672,000 ha and has 2,428,114 ha — 66 percent. To reach 100 percent the diet would have to fall to 0.71 ha per person, which is a composition question, not a boundary question.

Exercise 2.2 — The last mile, measured on yourself (one week)

Log every journey you make that carries food, with distance and approximate mass carried. Then:

  car at 6.0 L/100 km, petrol at 2.31 kg CO2 per litre  =  0.1386 kg CO2 / km
  with a 10 kg basket                                   =  13.86 g CO2 / kg / km
  container ship                                        =   0.014 g CO2 / kg / km
  ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
  one kilometre by car  =  990 kilometres by container ship

Multiply your week's food-carrying car kilometres by 990. That is your personal sea-freight equivalent. Coley, Howard and Winter found the published crossover at a 6.7 km round trip — which is 6,633 km of ocean.

Do not moralise about the result. Write it down and move to 2.3.

Exercise 2.3 — The ceiling on the whole argument (90 minutes)

Weber and Matthews measured the average US household's food footprint at 8.1 tonnes CO₂e a year: 83 percent production, 11 percent all transport, 4 percent final delivery. Their modal intensities, per tonne-kilometre, are 14 g for container ship, 18 g rail, 21 g inland water, 180 g truck, 680 g air — truck 12.9× container, air 48.6×.

Answer in writing: what is the largest emissions saving perfect localisation could deliver, and under what condition is even that unavailable?

Exercise 2.4 — Ricardo, by hand (2 hours)

Work the 1817 example without looking at the chapter. England: cloth 100 man-years, wine 120. Portugal: cloth 90, wine 80. Compute autarky, specialised output, the gain, and each country's opportunity cost of wine in cloth. Then compute the freight cost per traded unit at which the gain disappears.

You should get 390, 360, 30 man-years — 7.7 percent — and 15 man-years per traded unit, which is 15 percent of the cloth's cost and 18.75 percent of the wine's. If you get something else, find your error before reading on. The habit of finding your own error is the whole skill.

PART THREE — DREAM AND DESIGN

Weeks 9–12: build the balance

Exercise 3.1 — A commodity balance for one household (4 hours)

Take one week of your own food purchases. For each line, record: mass, price, origin if stated, and your best estimate of mode. Then sort every line into the four categories — regional by nature, regional in season, traded by nature, strategically held — with the test written beside it.

You will find most lines are traded by nature and that this is correct. The interesting lines are the ones that are regional by nature and that you are nonetheless buying from a distance, because those are free money.

Exercise 3.2 — The zeros (90 minutes)

List what your region cannot produce at all, and say why in terms of latitude, rainfall or frost date rather than in terms of policy. New York State is at zero in rice, cane sugar and peanuts; its entire citrus sector is one farm growing lemons with the acreage withheld to protect a single operation.

Then answer: what proportion of my calories comes from the zeros? Globally, Kinnunen and colleagues find 26 to 64 percent of people need more than 1,000 km to meet demand for a given crop, and only 11 to 28 percent can do it within 100 km. Your number belongs in that range somewhere. Find where.

Exercise 3.3 — Write the line you do not want to write (1 hour)

Produce one written recommendation, with arithmetic, that says buy this from four thousand kilometres away. Show it to someone who expects you to argue the other way.

This exercise is the term's hinge. A balance that has never recommended importing anything is an advocacy document with columns, and everybody can tell.

PART FOUR — DESTINY AND DELIGHT

Weeks 13–15: make it hold, and enjoy it

Exercise 4.1 — The standing report (2 hours)

Turn your household balance into something that can be refreshed in twenty minutes a month. If it cannot be refreshed in twenty minutes it will not be refreshed, and an instrument that runs once is an anecdote.

Exercise 4.2 — Walk the boundary (one day)

Go and find an edge. Not a county line — a real one: where the soil changes colour, where the drainage turns, where one tree species gives out and another starts. Stand on it. Take a photograph of the two soils in one frame.

This is not a mystical exercise. It is a calibration exercise. Everything in the chapter rests on the claim that these boundaries are physical, and you should verify that claim with your hands once.

Exercise 4.3 — The thing you did not know (30 minutes)

Write the single most surprising fact your balance produced. Almost everyone's is a surplus they were living beside and had never noticed.

THE TERM PROJECT

One place, measured, with a recommendation that could be acted on

The deliverable. A bioregional balance for one real place — a town, a campus, a hospital, a school district — with:

  1. The perimeter. Ecoregion, level, boundary version, one line.
  2. The balance. At least twelve material lines, each with regional demand, regional production and the delivered cost gap. No aggregate percentage anywhere in the document except as a range across commodities.
  3. The sort. Every line in one of the four categories, with its test shown.
  4. Three recommendations, of which at least one imports and at least one localises, each with the arithmetic that decides it.
  5. One priced hedge. A line that is cheap to import and slow to substitute, with premium ≤ p × L worked: at a premium of £42 per tonne and a loss of £400 per tonne, the implied annual probability is 10.5 percent — a figure a committee can accept or reject, which is the point.
  6. A denominator statement. What your balance did not look at.

The grading weight is on point six. Anybody can produce a balance. A student who can state precisely what their own instrument cannot see has learned the thing this chapter exists to teach.

SELF-ASSESSMENT

Answer honestly. Nobody sees this.

Six or more, and you can hold this argument with anybody. Fewer than four, and the missing ones are almost certainly the arithmetic exercises — go back and do them by hand, because the confidence comes from the working, not from the result.

CARRYING IT FORWARD

Two habits are worth keeping past the term.

The level, stated. Whenever anyone says regional or local, ask which level. You will be astonished how often nobody has decided, and how often the whole disagreement in the room dissolves when somebody does.

The vehicle, not the distance. Whenever anyone quotes a distance, ask for the mode and the load factor. Distance is the number people have; mode and load are the numbers that decide.

PART FIVE — THE SECOND READING

One week, on somebody else's work

The author is the one person who cannot see the fault in their own balance. This is structural rather than a failing, and the remedy is structural too: before you submit, read somebody else's balance and try to falsify it on a route that shares none of their assumptions.

Exercise 5.1 — Falsify, do not confirm (3 hours)

Take a classmate's balance and ask four questions in this order.

  1. Who will actually use this? A procurement officer, a council, a grower deciding what to plant. Test it as that person, not as a reader with the author's context.
  2. What did the number not look at? Every coverage figure has a denominator. If theirs uses national per-capita acreage, it assumes their population eats like the national average, assumes national yields on local land, and counts acreage that goes to fuel, industry and export — which means their grain and oilseed shortfalls are overstated as food.
  3. Is the correction itself a claim? If they have corrected a published figure, their correction now needs the same standard of evidence the original had.
  4. Is this a gap or a boundary? A zero in rice is a latitude. A zero in wheat where wheat grows is a market. Counting a boundary as damage is the commonest error in this whole field, and the second commonest is the reverse.

Exercise 5.2 — Recompute one number by another route (2 hours)

Pick their headline coverage figure and recompute it by a method that shares no inputs with theirs. The chapter does exactly this: the biophysical diet model gives New York City a claim of 23.50 million acres and the Census-acreage route gives 23.38 million, a disagreement of 0.5 percent. Two routes agreeing is a different object from one route asserting.

Write down the disagreement, not the agreement. The disagreement is the evidence.

Exercise 5.3 — Write the catch (30 minutes)

If you found something, write three lines: what was claimed, what was true, and how you knew. The third line is the only one anybody else can reuse.

COMMON ERRORS, AND HOW TO SPOT THEM IN YOUR OWN WORK

Distance standing in for mode. Somebody quotes kilometres and means emissions. Truck is 12.9× container ship per tonne-kilometre and air is 48.6×; a shorter journey by a worse mode is a worse journey.

The aggregate escaping. One self-sufficiency percentage on a slide, quoted where it is false. Publish a range across commodities or publish nothing.

Capacity confused with behaviour. A foodshed study says what a region could supply. What it does supply is a different measurement and the two get quoted against each other constantly.

The unstated level. Two people arguing about whether a place can feed itself while computing at different levels of the hierarchy. Ask which level. The argument usually ends there.

A zero that is actually a withholding. New York's citrus acreage is recorded as withheld to protect a single operation. Withheld is not zero, and a checker that cannot tell the difference cannot be trusted about either.

APPRECIATIVE QUESTIONS FOR YOUR SEMINAR

  1. What grows unusually well where we are, and what is it about this place that makes that true?
  2. When has someone here changed their mind because of an arithmetic result? What made that possible?
  3. Which of our assumptions about local food turned out to be right, and what was it right about?
  4. If everyone in this room kept a household balance, what would we be able to ask the institution for that we cannot ask for now?