The article doesn't mention permaculture. Permaculture has been used commercial settings (and its design principles includes agroforestry). Permies have been talking about resilient and regenerative systems for a long while now, going beyond sustainability.
Permaculture design looks at the whole system. So not just trees, but also things to plant with the trees. With planting along contours and adding swales to catch rainfall, and direct it to flow through everything. Incorporating animals into the system, such as grazers (cows, sheep, goats), and micrograzers (chickens, ducks, geese).
Probably the biggest thing not discussed in the article is how permaculture design can lead to decentralized food systems. A decentralized food system is not something that VCs can invest capital in and expect multiple returns on, but I think in the long run, that is where we as a civilization need to move towards.
Not just food. Let's "localize" all of our needs. Every single one of them. Note that is "needs", not wants.
There will always be room for trade in things that you cannot produce locally such as coffee, but for almost every other thing, there are local solutions.
Open Source Ecology [1] attempts to go the high-tech route and they may get somewhere, but they are only one of many approaches to localizing. With the internet we can have many groups working on localizing their own needs and sharing their successes and failures with the world. Add some gamification and wholla we have people competing to actully figure out how to live on this planet while leaving the place better afterwards.
Note that a completely local system would probably not have much need at all for state backed currency except for trade.
[1] http://www.opensourceecology.org
OSE has a permaculture page on their wiki, though hardly anyone added anything in there. This kind of stuff is not well-organized.
I thought, for example, building a graphdb-based lookup system for planning companion planting.
Another is some kind of decentralized barter system. Without being beholden to generating huge returns, I think this would be really useful. But like pioneer plants and “weeds”, I see a lot of permies using whatever adhoc means they have to trade information and barter for services. (But it is why I became very interested in Free Software, mesh networking, and raspberry pis. The supply chain that supports the internet is still fragile, and is currently coopted by Big Tech).
Does local production entail urban areas having smaller or less dense populations? Mightn't energy used for extra passenger transport outweigh energy saved by reducing freight transport?
Don't know. There are people in cities working on local food production such as aquaponics, vertical farming, rooftops, etc, but I live in a small town in western North America and that is the system I am attempting to analyze and influence. Its the low hanging fruit (ahem), in that if a small town can't do it, how can you expect a city.
Permaculture design looks at the whole system. So not just trees, but also things to plant with the trees. With planting along contours and adding swales to catch rainfall, and direct it to flow through everything. Incorporating animals into the system, such as grazers (cows, sheep, goats), and micrograzers (chickens, ducks, geese).
Probably the biggest thing not discussed in the article is how permaculture design can lead to decentralized food systems. A decentralized food system is not something that VCs can invest capital in and expect multiple returns on, but I think in the long run, that is where we as a civilization need to move towards.