Now, there is of course difference between Pfeiffer’s article and the groundnut scheme calculations in that the one calls for destruction while the other one calls for conservation and constraining our appetites for resources. But I consider that even irrelevant in comparison to the one question that really matters: is it valid to use numbers like that?

I am fairly sure here that, had we asked Fukuoka about his opinion, he would have pointed out that this approach of “let us classify and measure the industrial food production system first and see what the numbers tell us” is flawed right from the beginning. The key problem is that the underlying sort of thinking in simplified and streamlined production processes makes a number of implicit assumptions that immediately narrow down our perspective in a way that is very insidious because it happens unconsciously.

Let me repeat this: As soon as you even start to think in terms such as “gross agricultural production of apples/wheat/potatoes” or “water that needs to be pumped to produce a ton of grain”, you already have unconsciously narrowed down your field of vision so much that you no longer recognize the potential of creative niche utilization.

Quantitative rule-of-three thinking is an important tool and it can tell us a lot about what won’t work. But it is a double-edged sword in that when you try to apply it to anything but the in-animate world, great skill is needed in just seeing the load of implicit assumptions you are making, and then being able to judge whether these actually are justified. In my view, whoever tries to reason out the properties of complex biological systems in such a way would be well advised to read Fukuoka’s other book – not the “One Straw Revolution”, but the “Introduction to the Natural Way of Farming” toroughly first. It is a difficult book, because one gets confronted with a number of deep-running mistakes in our thinking we got so used to.

So, it is precisely because I do not recognize that level of competence in reasoning about the properties of complex biological systems in what Pfeiffer writes that I consider his analysis highly suspicious. Actually, as this keeps on popping up in many places, I think the Permaculture people would be well advised to just do one thing: go through this article with a comb and just list all the major assumptions that are being made implicitly and unconsciously. Here, I am not talking about addressing where this analysis might have gone wrong, just listing all the implicit assumptions: There are LOTS of them, and we have to be aware of that.