The forest could not rely on donor funding to survive, so it had to look elsewhere for finance. The centre’s first job was to identify the forest’s assets and to exploit them. It seems to have perfected its art. Today the centre makes money in areas such as ecotourism, timber-extraction, forest-products such as honey and oils, bio-prospecting and forestry research. Its results for 2008 reveal that it made a surplus for the first time that year, with revenues of $2.4m and a profit of $800,000. The previous year it had lost $200,000. Revenues from timber were up by 44%, ecotourism by 26% and training by 22%.

There should be more money to come. Eighteen months ago, it sold a licence for the measurement and valuation of the forest’s “ecosystem services”. This is not to say that the forest has actually sold these rights, but that an investment company, Canopy Capital, based in London, has bought the rights to create a financial deal for the forest’s services.

The Economist on monetizing a forest’s ecosystem services.

In almost any city anywhere in the world you can find both of these options. There will be McDonald’s which is part of the corporate entity headquartered in America, which pays that corporate entity for advertising, branding, research, for support, for all kinds of services, and which derives it legitimacy and promise of food consistency and safety from their oversight.

But there will also be Chinese food. It will vary a little from place to place as the cuisine adapts to local taste and ingredients. It will come in both cheap and expensive forms. It will be delivered, carried out, eaten in and all combinations thereof. It will be under a hundred thousand brands, operated by families, businesses, networks and individuals. There will be a few chains, and a lot of corner operations.

Both are global brands: shall we get “Chinese or McDonald’s?” is a perfectly reasonable thought. You walk into any chinese and in almost all cases the core menu will be the same: beef and cashew nuts, sweet and sour chicken, various noodles. Rice, white or egg fried. On top of this core, variety builds.

Anybody talking about global growth and global branding needs to look at the Chinese restaurant and the example it offers of how to get big – really, really big – one independent store, converged by instinct with all others to be a credible global brand.

Addenda: Pizza is an interesting case where there are lots of local one-store vendors, and lots of chains. Discuss!

Physically, it is quite simple to re-paint a street for a horde of bicycles. One small, determined adult could do this useful task in two or three nights. If they asked no permission from anyone. If they demanded no money for doing it. If they carried out that act with cool subterfuge and with crisp graphic precision, so that it looked ‘official’. If they calmly risked any possible arrest and punishment for this illicit act. And if they told no one, ever, about the work they did, or why, or how.

White Fungus by Bruce Sterling on, well, guerilla urbanism.

As the global financial crisis sinks Japan into its worst recession since World War II and hundreds of thousands of jobs are slashed in factories and offices, farming has emerged as a promising new career track. “Agriculture Will Save Japan,” blared a headline for a business weekly magazine. Farmer’s Kitchen, a popular new Tokyo restaurant, plasters its walls with posters of hunky farmers who supply the eatery with organic vegetables.

Seeing agriculture as one of the few industries that could generate jobs right now, the government has earmarked $10 million to send 900 people to job-training programs in farming, forestry and fishing. Japan’s unemployment rate was 4.4% in February, up from 3.9% a year earlier, but still lower than the U.S. or Europe. Some economists expect the figure to rise to a record 8% or so within the next couple of years.

Policy makers are hoping newly unemployed young people will help revive Japan’s dwindling farming population, where two in three full-time farmers are 65 or older. Of Japan’s total population, 6% work in agriculture, most doing so only part time, down from about 20% three decades ago.

Solution to Japan’s Jobless Problem: Send City Workers Back to the Land

Population fan-out is a simple concept: when life prospects or quality are better in the country than the city, the supposedly irreversible flow of population from the country/villages to the city simply reverses, and people go back to the land.

For some reason this seems to be hard for people to grasp: population flow to the cities can go the other way. The people just sell and go. In China, it’s not a genteel trickle of government subsidies farmers, it’s half the population of the United Kingdom picking up and going back home.

You’re going to hear a lot more about this kind of thing over the next few years. As life in the cities gets harder, and supply chain complexity begins to get really, really expensive, food prices will rise, and the stability of farming will begin to make more sense to people, particularly if you factor in Ivette Perfecto’s work on organic agriculture, do high intensity biodynamic or similar approaches like SPIN farming. Farming happens! #collapsonomics

“Twitter reverses the notion of the group,” said Paul Saffo, the Silicon Valley futurist. “Instead of creating the group you want, you send it and the group self-assembles.”

I think I know why this is happening. I could follow maybe 30 blogs. Every day or two, there would be slab of content from each one, and I’d sort of keep an eye on things. Twitter comes along, and the number of people I can keep in touch with goes up by a factor of about ten. I think this takes us past a critical point in our global interconnectedness. With a few hundred people that I’m regularly in contact with, I can post all kinds of diverse thoughts, and some people in that broad network will find it useful or relevant or surprising. If I need help, somebody knows who I should be asking. That jump – from a few dozen blogs, to a few hundred twitter streams – takes us across into a new domain of interconnected thinking.

One step closer.

Click the image for a PDF which builds out the model.

What it comes down to is four models of change, which are:

The Resilience Model:
Normal State -> Crisis -> Resilience -> Normal State

Successful Adaptation Model:
Normal State -> Adaptation -> Improved State

The Revolutionary Model:
Normal State -> Crisis* -> Revolutionary Change -> Unthinkable Improved State

*Note that the crisis could include a failure to adapt in the Adaptation model.

Finally, the Pathological Resilience Model:
Normal State -> Failure to Adapt -> Crisis -> Resilience -> Normal State

What I’m pointing at is that there’s an executive function in response to crisis: restore things to pre-crisis conditions using resilience models, or implement revolutionary change. Right now, what I’m not seeing in the dialogues about resilience that I’ve been exposed to is a clear discourse about resilience as an *alternative* to revolutionary change. I want to see a discourse about knowing when to make systems resilient and when to prime them for revolution.

I’m calling this “visionary adaptation” for the moment, but that’s just a hook to hang a hat on.

Florida’s most vulnerable coastline and tropical storms is really the key model for me here: the more resilient those who live there become, the more they’re going to tend to choose to live in a place which is extremely crisis-prone rather than moving to safety. Revolutionary change is move to a safer place. Resilience is about gearing up to survive the storms.

We need a dialogue about where resilience fits into the spectrum of response, and how it fits into system level problems where the drivers for the crisis are not external but internal. I’m going to leave this to sit for a while now, but if you have any thoughts, ideas or feedback on the model, please let me know.

Resilience, n.
1. The ability to recover quickly from illness, change, or misfortune; buoyancy.

2. The property of a material that enables it to resume its original shape or position after being bent, stretched, or compressed; elasticity.

The problem is we are not ever going to return to our original shape or position. There are philosophical reasons for this: you can’t step in the same river twice. There are practical reasons for this: technology and politics are constant change, and technology produces all kinds of acceleration. But, simply, the future, whatever it is, good or bad, is not going to look like the past.

Resilience is a comforting concept. It says “you can take a licking and keep on ticking.” It says “you will recover and restore your original shape after a crisis.” It’s fundamentally nostalgic. You wish for the way things were, and you put things back that way after the storm has passed.

My friends, the storm is not going to pass. The storm is called life. We want systems which do not suffer from cascading failures. We want systems which keep working through trouble. We want systems which are easy to fix when they break.

But we want systems that aggressively and relentlessly adapt to their environments – good and bad – and any opportunity to prosper therein, not just systems that can recover from being whacked.

Resilience is passive. We need to move beyond it before the concept gets too dug in.

In the industrial age, mass production by firms exploited the economies of scale. We are however transitioning to a postindustrial age, the network age where emerging Peer Production by networks will be driven by the economies of agility. Economies of scale are about driving down costs of manufactured goods by producing them on a large scale. Economies of agility in contrast are about quickly being able to switch between producing different goods and services in response to demand.

Read the rest of Mamading’s post on economies of agility.

Twitter was a sharp reminder of that.

Any attempt to map the future will fail, but I think that there are some deep shifts – megatrends, if you will – which we can say are parts of nearly all probable scenarios.

1> Solar energy is going to be very, very cheap. (see)

2> Industrialized economies will not be concentrated in America and Europe, and industrial wealth will move to poorer areas of the world. (this is already true)

3> Post-industrial and pre-industrial wealth will be distributed globally based on cultural and agricultural productivity. (this is already true for pre-industrial, becoming true for post-industrial)

4> The push towards a one-world approach to managing natural resources will produce clamor for a plausible one world government. (this is already true, though marginal)

Now let’s actually track these trends forwards: climate change is largely taken out by solar energy displacing coal first, and then oil. Agriculturalists all over the world get cheap access to solar electricity for farm machines, communications and domestic comforts. Wealth inequalities tend to even out in the face of industry moving around the planet. Biodiversity loss and deforestation take up a lot of the slack from global warming as The Big Threat. Already this is a very different world.

The “trimtab” in this situation is where we look at how ICT arrives in the developing world. It’s already rolling out very, very fast – nearly 100% cell phone adoption by 2020. The question is, are we going to wind up with two billion people with cell phones but no toilet, or are we going to figure out how to enable people to build their own essential services using information and other resources they organized over the network?

This is an area where what we do actually has the power to tip the scales one way or the other, in the same way that the Linux development community is tipping the scales globally towards open information ecosystems.

So this is my simple story about the future. Big trends are converging to make the world more equitable, but there are some critical areas where we can work together to make a big difference in how the future turns out.

The likelihood of the penal system in the UK and other Western countries facing similar challenges in the current climate to the ones former Soviet countries faced post-collapse is moderate to high. Crime rates and imprisonment rates have no correlation – high or low use of custody is a question of political will and nothing else. In the UK in the past decade crime has fallen steadily whilst the imprisonment rate has virtually doubled in steps over 15 years, in addition to the thousands of new offences which have been added to the statute books via 55 new Criminal Justice acts. Since 1996, the number of under-14s going into custody has increased by a staggering 550% – this is just one illustration of the default response to society’s problems being an inappropriate criminal justice-based one.

The situation is not unique to the UK, these problems are endemic in the Western world. In the US nearly 8% of citizens have been in contact in with the criminal justice system. In the Netherlands (once the poster child of penal reformers) the prison population has tripled since the 1990s. Poland, which did so well to reform the Soviet-style system has gone far the other way, and is experiencing US-type levels of overcrowding. In fact, the only EU country where the prison population rate is falling is Romania.

Anton Shelupanov of Think Justice on managing the prison system during a financial crisis

Really excellent stuff. Get over there and read it