Don't Do

Anything a man builds begins decaying and falling apart the instant its finished, even if it's not used. For example if you make something out of wood, UV radiation, fungi, mold, water start wearing away at it immediately. Even durable building materials start to crumble and fall apart once exposed to the elements and arranged in a man-made pattern, like perfectly square and plumb concrete walls or stone walls.

It doesn't take many years for untreated wood to start to fall apart once it's exposed to the elements. Stuff that performs some function, like a road, gets destroyed by traffic and the elements. As the footprint of all the stuff expands, more and more resources and human time and energy are consumed to try to keep it "alive".

The amount of time and energy that goes into maintaining various things people take completely for granted, like on demand electricity, is staggering. A few years ago I observed maintenance of high voltage power lines from Perry Nuclear Power Plant. The lines and insulators and other hardware are replaced on a regular schedule. Every single tower carrying the power lines is periodically repainted and concrete piers are repaired and replaced. Work crews travel around the country performing that demanding and expensive task.

When we moved to our current property, I started building out farm infrastructure every spring and summer. The first year I built a small woodshed. Then I built a garden fence, an enclosure for ducks and chickens, a greenhouse... but soon I realized each new building was not only consuming money and resources for materials to be built, but would be a future drain of time and money for maintenance while producing only a modest amount of food. I pulled the plug on my plans for building a big barn and other infrastructure with the same approach.

The traditional method for analyzing these projects is to look at productivity improvement of some tool or infrastructure versus the costs involved. The "measure" of productivity is typically money, however, that's a bad measure. When "real" terms are used, like energy or materials, there's probably no positive return ever. It's all consumption. Higher "productivity" just consumes more faster with maybe fewer hands involved. That's a bitter pill to swallow.

In the natural system terms, it's really only possible to rearrange the annual flow of sunlight and use materials that nature provides. Living in the context of the natural system generally leads to a "don't do" mentality, a concept that is core to Masanobu Fukuoka's farming methods.

Almost any piece of technology or infrastructure you might look at will fail the "should I do it" test when real terms are used. A couple of basic questions a person might ask about a given piece of tech or infrastructure: "does it really save energy or time of an actual person?" and "does it save energy or time in aggregate?" Almost any project will fail those questions.