Solving for pattern. Solutions good in all respects.
Some on this island are readers and devotees of Wendell Berry, the Kentucky writer whose thinking undergirds many of today’s ideas of agriculture and sustainability. One of his ideas that has been applied outside of farming is solving an issue for pattern.
The idea of “solving for pattern” requires one to step back, look at and define what the “problem” is before the issue can be fixed. Such is the popularity of the idea that it can be used for business start-ups, and all manner of social ills.
Some of the best analogies in life come from agriculture. Old aphorisms and proverbs often use agricultural analogies. Jesus used them often in parables. From Matthew, “you will know them by their fruits” or Luke’s “harvest is great.” Mark wrote about the sower, “But when the sun was up it was scorched, and because it had no root it withered away.”
Berry wrote “Solving for Pattern” as an essay for the Rodale magazine The New Farm. It was republished in a book, “The Gift of the Good Land,” in 1981. The essay is easily available on the web; we found a copy posted by the Texas Children’s Commission, ostensibly posted there because it could be applied to families and foster care. Dozens of other organizations and consultants post it, as it is so useful for multiple applications of social policy.
Berry wrote:
“My immediate concern here is with the irony of agricultural methods that destroy, first, the health of the soil and, finally, the health of human communities. But I could just as easily be talking about sanitation systems that pollute, school systems that graduate illiterate students, medical cures that cause disease, or nuclear armaments that explode in the midst of the people they are meant to protect. This is a kind of surprise that is characteristic of our time: the cure proves incurable; security results in the evacuation of a neighborhood or a town.”
His idea was that solutions that are bad are ones that serve one good “at the expense of another” or worsen the problem, causing a sort of cycle of destruction. He also talks about simplistic solutions that have larger biological or social costs. The wrong solutions, he asserts, are ones that are formed in ignorance of patterns, and then destroy other things in the process. A farmer that has unsustainable fields, so buys bigger equipment and buys more land.
He then goes into solutions, and how to define a good one. To paraphrase:
1. A good solution accepts given limits.
2. A good solution considers a place to be a single organism.
3. A good solution is often cheap, and should not enrich one party at the expense of another.
4. A good solution answers both the question and the problem.
5. A good solution has a “wide margin” so if there is failure, it does not preclude other answers down the line.
6. A good solution is good in all respects.
7. A good solution improves balance and harmony.
8. A good solution is not to be expected from absentee owners or absentee experts.
9. A good solution solves more than one problem, and does not create others.
The problems of this island, to environment and person, are not isolated to Boca Grande. Last week, the island nearly ran out of water, such was the overuse from irrigation. That water comes from beneath Rotonda, pulled from Cape Haze aquifers. If that runs low, we pull from the Peace River, if we run out on the Cape’s wells.
The supply is fine now, but the answer to the problem is not bigger storage tanks, but prudent use of water, and the planting of regionally friendly landscapes. If we run out of well water, it is purchased from Charlotte County, under the authority of the state. They are happy to sell it, but that is not the issue.
There are also numerous ideas for how to solve a beach access issue that are going into an ordinance being drafted as we speak by people on this island and by a $2.4 billion-budget Lee County, 90 minutes away from us.
Perhaps a summer reading project for us all is to think of how to get a better fix on island issues “for pattern.” What are some elegant solutions that fit these criteria?
Garland Pollard is editor of the Boca Beacon. Email letters and comments to editor@bocabeacon.com.
