The blog has moved

by Paula | 26 June 2010 | permalink | comments
Tags: personal,

Hey all, please take note — the blog has moved to rabbit-mountain.com.

I’m slowly porting over the articles one by one, so if you click an archive link that takes you to Rabbit Mountain, don’t be alarmed.

home » Can shipping container logic be run sideways?

Can shipping container logic be run sideways?

by Paula | 22 December 2008 | permalink | comments
Tags: relocalization, systems

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The following posts have both been out for some time, but they made a synchronous appearance together in my feed reader today.

Back in February of this year, Alice Friedemann’s review of a book called The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger, by author Mark Levinson, was published at the Culture Change website. Friedemann’s review is scathing — not of the book so much, but rather of the whole complex shipping containers enabled. She writes:

To me, what Levinson leaves out is how this global distribution system will make it very difficult to go back to local production as energy declines. He doesn’t mention that containerization was the fastest way yet for capitalism to loot the planet and strip Mother Earth down to her hard dry skin.

. . .

Wham! Imagine what will happen when the energy crisis strikes forever, and only the military and politically connected have gasoline. It’s great that container ships carry cargo efficiently, and perhaps can be towed by giant kites (experiments are underway). But what can be shipped with inland factories scattered across several continents? How will all the bits and pieces of Barbie find each other?

With limited energy, it will be hard to go back in time, to rebuild docks and local factories plus all the other sail-based infrastructure. Humpty Dumpty didn’t just fall off the wall, where we could have glued him back, he’s been blown up, his ashes scattered around the world, and there’s not enough time or energy to put him back together again.

Then in August, John Robb cited the shipping container to illustrate the concept of a “platform,” which he defines thus: “At a high level, a platform takes related activities that are complex, unique, and variable and turns them into activities that are simple, universal, and standard.”

His definition is a bit nebulous for me, so from his shipping container illustration, I infer “platform” to mean a generic, scalable solution to some bottleneck within a system. In any event, Robb writes:

Resilient communities aren’t built through one-off projects/efforts, good will, and lifestyle changes. Instead, they are a vibrant ecosystems of activity, that are innovative, robust, and efficient. The key to growing ecosystems that exhibit these qualities is to build platforms that span everything from electricity to food to security. Here’s a short story about Malcom McLean to get your head around the idea of what a platform is (this is for my upcoming book on Resilient Communities) and why they are so powerful:

. . .

The new containerized system he [Malcom McLean] developed simplified shipping by pushing the complexity of packing and unpacking cargo to the edges of the shipping network. Second, it made interconnection with the network easy, since containers were inexpensive and of a standard set of sizes. Finally, it lowered/standardized costs, reduced theft, and limited damage.

. . .

Obviously, it didn’t end there. The advantages in speed, cost, and flexibility were so compelling that the entire shipping industry was transformed as companies, ports, and governments adopted his containerization process. By 2000, nearly 90% of the world’s shipping was accomplished using containers in support of a vast global ecosystem of manufacturers and retailers made possible by Malcom’s shipping platform.

These two posts analyzing the importance of the shipping container bring to light a contradiction. The purpose of the platform, in this case and, as far as I am able to tell, in all cases, is efficiency. But in fact, what shipping container efficiency has introduced to the world is unprecedented brittleness.

I see the need for a prefabricated, standardized relocalization package — it needs to happen ASAP, and a platform would allow that kind of rapid deployment. But would a platform then simply spread the brittleness down to a granular level, even more so than is already the case? Would duplicating the same socio-economic architecture in communities everywhere — which is what a platform would do — make all communities vulnerable to some unforeseeable weak link?

The logic of the shipping container is to increase efficiency, and therefore brittleness as a side effect. Can that logic somehow be run sideways — to reduce brittleness at an increasingly efficient rate? I can’t help but think of a very interesting fact I learned back in my intro biology class in college: healthy ecosystems work precisely because biological diversity is terribly inefficient.

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