A Good Start

Thanks, Mark, for your post. It is a good start to our semester-long discussion. I was moving my chickens out to do some weeding at the field today and I was thinking of the picture I showed in class last week. I think that the analogy of the chicken is appropriate for so many aspects of sustainability. The discussion in Tom Wessels' book about the GDP illustrates the tendency to measure only one aspect of our overall economy, in the same way that we tend to value chickens for only one aspect of their overall traits, either their eggs or meat. My chickens are now older than most chickens in America are allowed to get. They are almost 10 weeks old and most meat birds are slaughtered at about 8 weeks. My chickens are a mix of different heritage breeds, ones that are not selected purely for their rapid conversion of feed to meat, as the standard industrial Cornish cross breeds are. So if I were to measure them only by their conversion efficiency, I would have to judge them to be inferior breeds. Yet, my hope and expectation is that they can perform tasks that the Cornish cross breed, which often gets too heavy to walk after about 6 weeks old, cannot. I would like to use the chickens as weeders, as soil tillers, as bug controllers, and so use more of their skills than just their metabolic capacity. I think Wessels argues essentially for the same thing, that we measure the economy by more than just its pure productivity of technology or widgets. He points out that by measuring the success of companies only by their profitability on the stock market, the real value of the company to the community was neglected, either being undervalued or overvalued. Perhaps we can make a lot of progress toward sustainability by simply changing what we measure and what we value. Find the right measurements could then allow us to set more useful goals to achieve.
Spencer