A blog-writing gift from the universe.
A moment after I submitted my last post, the customer service attendant on the train came past and apologised that they didn’t have any food available.
But outside, just beyond the platform at Didcot Parkway station, the hedgerows are groaning with fruit.
So what would it take to get that fruit in here?
Well, there’d need to be a hedgerow fruit-picking company. This company would need to train its staff on the safe handling of fruit in the railway environment.
The fruit would then need to be transported to a logistics hub, sensibly by train but more likely by road.
There would need to be a food logistics processing hub, probably located centrally for transport convenience but potentially a long way from the fruit bush and the fruit eater.
All this transport means the fruit might spoil, so it needs to be put in plastic packaging, which requires its own supply chain of oil extraction, government lobbying, single-use plastic manufacture and waste gathering and processing stream.
Because it’s fresh fruit, it also needs cold storage. So now we need refrigerants, which means another supply chain.
All of this would need to be coordinated by a rail catering logistics company, complete with departments for HR, finance, compliance, managerial oversight and operations.
The fruit, picked, packaged and chilled, would then need to be re-transported to local train catering distribution hubs in Bristol and Swindon, from which stock levels can be managed using GPS-enabled (yep, satellites) apps on every train trolley.
Finally, the blackberries on the trolley, they can now be served, as long as the card reader can get reception.
Quite a journey for blackberries that are mere metres away.
Of course this is all silly. But then again, I’m not convinced the way we organise our economy is all that sensible.
- Have we created systems that are so centralised and specialised that they can’t handle what’s right in front of them?
- Have we scaled things to a point where the cost of the support structures outweigh the benefits of what we are actually doing?
This is the essence of the intensification paradox – more scale leading to more layers and multiplying costs. The scaling of each part of the system enables a profit to be extracted, but the overall burden is increased.
If we want systems that enable us to live within planetary boundaries, then we need systems that can:
- build relationships rather than become abstracted
- seek to work with abundance
- respond to changes in place and time
- scale elegantly
Catering blackberries aside, these are the sorts of question the regenerative designer works with:
- how do we enhance connection rather than build separation?
- how do we work with what the rhythm of what is available, enhancing the system even through our harvest?
- how do we respond to local, emergent changes in the system
- how do we scale elegantly, where scale enables the primary relationship between production and consumption, not distancing it?