We Need to Move from an Either/Or Past to a Both/And Future
"Learning to think like a region."
The heading of this post is Rule Number 11 in Alan M. Webber’s book, Rules of Thumb: 52 Truths for Winning at Business Without Losing Self, sitting somewhere on one of my bookshelves at home in Cape Town.
On Wednesday, 22 July 1992, The Wall Street Journal, published Planning for Uncertainty, by Peter Drucker, who was the Clarke Professor of Social Science and Management at Claremont Graduate University at the time; a position which he held from 1971 until his death in 2005.
At the end the second paragraph, Drucker posed a straightforward yet profoundly thought-provoking question, “What has already happened that will create the future?” At the start of the subsequent paragraph, he wrote, “The first place to look is in demographics.” Building upon this insightful line of reasoning, I would like to contribute two additional words to this answer: "African agrobiodiversity."
One demographic that has occupied my thoughts since I witnessed its rugged natural beauty in 2017 is the seemingly forgotten smallholder sheep farmers in the edge community of Vaalbank, a cluster of rural villages along the south-north continuum between the rural towns of Komani and Dordrecht in the Chris Hani District Municipality of the Eastern Cape province in South Africa. My retirement homeplace on the hinterland.
The ‘African agrobiodiversity’ are the crops and livestock that were once well adapted to the region and were cultivated by my local ancestors as staple foods, which I also grew up eating as an essential source of nourishment.
Why Vaalbank and why now?
Over the past thirty years, since the advent of democracy in South Africa, the people of Vaalbank have experienced a litany of losses, leading them to the painful realization that South Africa is fast becoming a “flailing state facing countless polycrises.” Amongst the local smallholder sheep farmers this awareness is gradually fostering a collective understanding that their future should be rooted in the pursuit of a regional ‘nature state’ and self-determination.
The endless litany of losses include: The loss of indigenous seed bank and crops that, many years ago, were deliberately destroyed through fire to make room for the yellow maize which currently dominates everything in our daily diets; the subsequent loss of food sovereignty and food security; loss of sustainable livelihoods; loss of every single one of the region’s eight capitals for community wealth building (individual, intellectual, social, cultural, natural, built, political, and financial); loss of rural progress; loss of social equity; loss of environmental wellbeing; loss of predictable and reliable prosperity, and most importantly the loss of resilience.
For the purpose of a common understanding, as Michael Fairbanks once suggested, “Prosperity is the ability of an individual or group to provide shelter, nutrition, and other material goods that enable people to live a good life, according to their own definition. Prosperity helps to create the space in peoples’ hearts and minds so that, unfettered by the everyday concern of the material goods they require to survive, they might develop a healthy emotional and spiritual life, according to their preferences. Prosperity can only be achieved when a group’s leadership sets its own vision and follows a self-determined path.” The Resilience & Transformation Report: A Regional Approach (2012) succinctly defines “human resilience as the capacity to effectively influence and adapt to change.”
In addition to the aforementioned losses above, local communities are losing one of their most valuable natural resources, their children. En masse, they are joining the Exodus without Moses in a futile search for the nonexistent greener pastures in the metropolitan areas across the country. Simply put, it’s a total onslaught.
Vaalbank represents a South African demographic that has always been hidden in plain sight. Visible but largely unnoticed. Long time ago, the region was robbed of scores of its men; subsistence farmers who lived off the land to support their families. Those men were forcefully taken away to become cheap labor in the South Africa gold and coal mines, as well as, in someone else’s ‘commercial agriculture’. Similarly, this is also a demographic whose rich agrobiodiversity of indigenous crops, trees and livestock such as amaranth, millet, sorghum (amazimba), cowpeas, kei apple (Dovyalis caffra (umqokolo)), indigenous green and wild mustard were destroyed through callous acts of cultural extermination.
Across the regional landscapes, the original, immense, indigenous grasses that once provided forage for livestock have been replaced by a woody invasive shrub called ilapesi (“Euryops Floribundus”), which has now been included in the red list of protected species, notwithstanding the impact of the shrub's spread on the natural water balance of the regional watersheds. In the communities of Vaalbank, sheep farming has been a way of life for over a century. But that way of life too was compromised by the previous government and continues to suffer a similar fate under the current “nation state.”
In case you may be wondering, what the hack is a ‘nature state’ and how does it differ from a ‘nation state’? In Nature State: Ten Parables for the Anthropocene, a pocket size book that was gifted to me by its author and longtime friend, Spencer Biddle Beebe, Founder of Salmon Nation, Founder of Ecotrust and Co-founder of Conservation International, defines a ‘nature state’ as “just another way of expressing a “bioregion,” a naturally occurring, relatively coherent, landscape-scale geographic area defined by shared ecological characteristics of climate, soil, water, and plant and animal species. Bioregional boundaries are generally wiggly, following nature more than the straight lines of nations. Bioregions also generally include shared large-scale human, cultural, and economic characteristics. So really, we’re simply talking about both people and place on a scale that matters. We’re talking about home. Define home however you like, but in a way that captures large-scale and distinctive natural, economic, and social qualities and processes. Simply put, it means building new kinds of communities and identities around natural boundaries rather than political ones.”
A Collaborative Landscape Design
Collectively, the communities of Vaalbank are learning to think like a region, as Daniel Kemmis’s essay in the High Country News contends. Their interest in a Collaborative Landscape Design for the benefit of their communities has increased significantly during the past two years, even although many remain uncertain about how to execute its basic elements.
Guided by the technical expertise and wisdom of John Strauser, Grassland and Perennial Agriculture Outreach Specialist with the University of Wisconsin-Madison Extension, and his colleagues at the Grassland 2.0 initiative, we understand the “Collaborative Landscape Design as an iterative process with five primary elements.
Connecting people – Transformational change requires working with a broad coalition of people. A plurality of relationships allows for the diverse perspectives needed to facilitate conversion across scales.
Envisioning novel landscapes – To work toward a future state, people must come together and identify what they want from their landscapes and communities. What is it that people currently like about their landscape, and what needs to change?
Designing supply chains – Directing attention toward developing markets and production systems that reward and care for the workforce, farmers, processors, and others. Those who work and care for the land need economic structures that fairly and consistently compensate them for their efforts and stewardship of a valuable resource.
Planning enterprises – As transformation happens, farmers, businesses, and consumers must work together as they navigate a transition to a new food production system. Tools and expertise are brought to bear on individual farm enterprises to help farmers explore what’s possible – economically, socially, and ecologically – within novel socio-ecological landscapes.
Incentivizing change – As transitions occur, it will be important to encourage or speed up transformational change through social and economic means. Critical here is for communities to develop approaches and systems to Collaborative Landscape Management, an ongoing process of governance that allows for adaptive approaches to problems as they emerge.
By engaging with the elements of Collaborative Landscape Design, through the Learning Hubs, people in are actively engaged in place-making – working toward producing transformational changes in our agricultural systems by constructing a desirable future.”
It is this kind of a both/and mindset that we hope advance to create economic opportunity, social equity, shared prosperity, environmental wellbeing and resilience in this one rural community in South Africa.
Let’s quickly go back to Drucker’s question above, “What has already happened that will create the future?” The re-emergence of sorghum as a superfood and the return of sheep wool as a fiber of choice for the lifestyle of health and sustainability consumers. Produced as differentiated products rather than commodities, sorghum and wool are the future. It has already happened that the Vaalbank region knows how to grow them.
Because “even the food we eat has a story,” next week, I will share a remarkable and divine story of how one morning in 2017, I missed a clearly marked turn off on a country road and found myself in Vaalbank.