Why Out-of-the-Box does not come from Academia
‘Academic integrity’ rarely integrates into the real world, the one where supply chains collapse and communities starve while food rots in warehouses. Our ivory-tower academics often represent our point of catastrophic failure. When they don’t know the answer, they often don’t ask the people living through collapse, in these instances they are not honest, nor virtuous, they are incompetent, and downright dangerous.
People like Shannon Dobbs and Bob Philipson become creative and more wise through lived experience. For the most part our academics are trapped within the walls of their universities, they do not interact directly with the ebb and flow of day-to-day communal survival.
Shannon has put together a playful protocol to share the essence of his lively inventiveness with the rest of us. Shannon identifies that academia, and high-performing individuals, often become ‘the point of catastrophic failure’. In The Scrounger Protocol, Shannon describes appropriate education for collapse, designed to equip all civilians for supply chain disruption. Shannon envisions an economy that exploits AI wisely, thereby enabling everyone to navigate complexity by rapidly evolving and sharing collective intelligence.
This article summarises and links to various articles from Shannon’s blog on his website: The Fellowship of Living Systems. In this article we shall explore Shannon’s imaginative ideas to integrate the many facets of the growing eco-regeneration movement with our existing food supply chain.
Minimising Food Waste
In this article Shannon pitches a pilot plan requiring $3 billion to prove a business concept to minimise the current losses of ~$970 billion per annum, arising in the United States from coordination failures in food, waste, and resource systems. Those same resources, if they were in the right place, can reduce waste and deliver more useable food within a modest budget.
Shannon has ruffled a few feathers by thinking outside-the-box. I am urging his critics to reconsider. Many people who are trying to envision a sustainable economy don’t fully understand how the mechanisms they are controlling with their policy decisions actually work. This creates a massive mismatch between policymakers and implementing agencies, and this is compounded by the fact that a lot of the implementing agencies have personal reasons for not wanting to implement. This story from Shannon about the death of the Safeway supermarket chain in the USA introduces the reader to Shannon’s perceptive grasp of all aspects of the food supply chain, the levers, and the many more options that are possible with an open-minded approach.
We are all guilty of some level of denial, delusion, and hypocrisy. It is important that we step out of siloed thinking and become willing to imagine different strategies and learn to see our shared existential predicament from different perspectives. In this playful sci-fi story, Grokking the Elephant: A Fable for Fragmented Times, Shannon captures the importance of dropping our toxic desire to compete or outshine or silence others.
The linear supply chain model is haemorrhaging value. Feeding America and other sources estimate that food waste in the United States results in an economic loss of over $408 billion annually. The cost of Nitrogen and chemical fertilizer pollution comes to $157 Billion annually. The healthcare costs of diet-related disease amounts to $1.1 Trillion. The cost of climate disasters like fires, storms cost $165 Billion in 2022 alone. Perpetuating business-as-usual costs the USA $2 trillion a year in waste, damage, and sickness. Investing in tensegrity infrastructure like blast chillers, soil nodes, etc, is not an ‘expense’, it’s a ‘stop-loss’ order on the biggest haemorrhage in human history.
Permaculture Paradise Lost
In this article Your Permaculture Paradise is Fed by the Same Broken System You Left Behind, Shannon reveals that the Permaculture movement is one of many examples where we attempt to implement a solution whilst trapped within a toxic socio-economic model.
Bob Philipson is working hands-on with the Goulburn Mulwaree Community Sustainability Hub which spans both rural and urban arenas. Bob explains that Shannon’s article proposes what they are in the process of building. Bob says that Permaculture can form a large part of the story once it is adopted in its entirety. The proposals unfolding in Goulburn Mulwaree and Bega Circular Valley, involve building a series of community sustainability hubs that collaborate towards collective sustainability. These projects are inspired by the One Planet Living framework from Bioregional UK.
Threatening Existing Power Structures
Shannon’s ideas do not require changes to policy, but they do fundamentally threaten the existing commercial power structures. In this article: The Food Preservation Myth: How ‘Do It Yourself’ Thinking Prevents ‘Do It Together’ Solutions , Shannon offers numerous real examples of communal food preservation strategies that have optimised existing infrastructure and minimised food waste, thereby scaling skills and possibilities from the individual to impacting entire communities.
Shannon’s blog contains many imaginative perspectives on the challenges facing humanity. Shannon demonstrates how AI can break through barriers of both language and belief. In this article he describes how a 13 year-old, after listening to a salesman talking about a water filtration system, subsequently used AI to learn about the difference between physical filtration and reverse osmosis. The teenager then prepared a little primer video to explain what she had learned, and shared this impactful message with her community who were suffering from the polluted water from Lake Victoria in Kenya. This interplay between AI and an inquisitive teenager avoided a costly community investment that would not have delivered drinkable water to the community.
Sadly, the key driver of the pollution in Lake Victoria is human overpopulation. EarthOvershoot.org indicates that Kenya is overpopulated by about 25 million people, which is about 46% of the entire population. Although too much reliance on AI, would undoubtedly be problematic, AI offers us all the scope to contribute creatively during the transition away from the current ecocidal socio-economic model. Wise use of AI enhances knowledge sharing and learning; this could accelerate our evolution towards a global society operating within the carrying capacity of Earth.
Land Syndication
When you invest in a regenerative farm through syndication you are decoupling from the existing power structure. You own a piece of actual land. You are not reliant on a company founder’s promises; a company that might choose to pivot to selling NFTs next quarter. Land is real, physical, it can only be disrupted by weather extremes and human folly. If we learn to respect Nature, and recognise our dependence on healthy ecosystems, then Shannon explains Land Syndication offers a way to finance some of the changes needed in his article: There’s a Better Way Than Venture Capital to Fund Climate Solutions
The secret is not just investing in land; it’s about decoupling the asset from the operation. In the Venture Capital model, investors buy shares in the company itself. This gives them the power to force the company to grow too fast, cut corners, or sell out to a conglomerate. In Shannon’s Land Syndication model, investors buy the physical infrastructure: the building, the land, or the blast chillers. The Community Organization then leases these assets.
This means the investors get a steady, reliable return (rent) secured by real property, but they never own the mission. They cannot force a pivot or derail the strategies. They cannot demand a sell-out. It creates an ‘anti-fragile’ alliance where capital gets safety, and community gets sovereignty.
The switch from ‘control’ to ‘rental’ income is the ingredient that defuses the tendency to injustice through Capitalism. Our politicians could encourage this type of investment, with reduced wealth-taxes when wealth is invested in schemes that are clearly beneficial to the community. It also builds the socio-economic resilience, the ‘Tensegrity’, within the food supply chain that Shannon recommends in his Scrounger Protocol.
Achieving changes within the existing model
Food suppliers, or any empowered coordinators within large corporations can initiate and take responsibility for changes to the supply chain simply by exploring the possibilities for varied vendor relationships. The new arrangements can be established with appropriate insurance and cold chain processes that can align with the public mandates, by obtaining approval from the appropriate governance health agency.
New or altered supply systems can emerge from plans initiated at any point within any hierarchy. It could be within a city planning department or many levels down from the board of directors in some large commercial enterprise. If supply-chain wastage problems are addressed and solved by enterprise and imagination that emerges at the lower levels in a big company, this makes the choices at the top levels easier.
Shannon identifies three points of leverage in the food system where such mechanisms might be appropriate, and offers some examples of successful implementation:
1) Blast Chillers — MGM Grand Hotel celebrated 5 million meals rescued in Las Vegas over the past decade in a pilot program initiated by their food bank, ThreeSquare, which also services most of Southern California. Shannon reverse engineered their successes to make the technology and processes they developed accessible to community scale groups, including churches and others who have or can access under-utilized commercial kitchens. The experience is covered in this story: The Implementation Crisis: A Tale of Innovation, Institutional Inertia, and the Future of Food System Transformation | LinkedIn
2) Humisoil. This bacteria 🦠 was discovered in the Amazon jungle in the 90s, has been proven in over 32 countries. This powerful soil-improvement method is being rejected by composting industries as a competitive threat to their other products and services. It makes the entire sunk cost of their industry unnecessary. This process converts organics into a topsoil amendment that GROWS WATER through bacterial photosynthesis.
At COP28, VRM Biologik case studies were presented in this video. This process potentially amplifies John Kempf’s excellent analysis of transitioning strategies to accelerate conversions from conventional to regenerative farming practices. Shannon discusses this omission in his article The Missing Acceleration Layer: How Urban Waste Streams Could Speed Kempf’s Regenerative Transition.
3) Dry goods stores. Shannon offers a model based on pre-1930s stores that were ubiquitous throughout the US and globally until the supermarket model took over due to cold-war propaganda. These stores are specifically designed for urban and rural food deserts, they promise to create new pathways into markets regional farmers currently cannot access. They serve as the cornerstone in the methodologies that Shannon describes in this article: Why Safeway Is Closing: When Cold War Propaganda Infrastructure Meets Community Reality
Are You Comfortable With These Ideas?
Because the smart route to take to accomplish these goals is through rural producers and not city NGOs, Shannon developed a replicable and scalable business model that shows farmer collectives and rural communities how to accomplish this goal. Shannon had decades of successful businesses before he retired, as well as relevant military training and experience, and over a decade of subsequent research. Shannon’s expertise is freely available; he advocates open source sharing of experience and knowledge.
Most kitchen managers want to reduce and divert their waste streams. They cannot do that internally, because they cannot change their SOPs (Standard Operating Procedures) without executive approval. They can sign vendor agreements with companies to take that waste, and they have discretion about which vendors they choose. That is the shift; sustainability hubs need to become the preferred vendor.
Most farmers would love to access new markets, and new sources of organic topsoil that reduces irrigation and chemical fertilizer dependency. Unlike city dynamics, which are complex and filled with often competing priorities to the point of dysfunction, rural communities have growth metrics and the expertise to create soil from inputs.
Every community without access to healthy food would benefit from better access. Every ‘Food is Medicine’ program and doctor who recommends healthy whole foods would love to be able to point their patients toward accessible healthy food.
Those points are the only things that matter other than these:
The legal framework that empowers business activities is robust and sufficient enough to handle innovative business solutions without requiring new laws. Policymakers by definition write and argue about policy, aka new laws and changes to existing laws. People trained in policy level advocacy simply do not understand this point 👉 nor do they wish to.
The reason that Shannon made the shift from focusing on support for regenerative practitioners to municipal planners is simple. The regenerative practitioner knows soil health, agroforestry, silvopasturing, they may even know cottage industry, and farm scale processing, but they do not understand city market dynamics, and that makes them uncomfortable.
It makes them uncomfortable enough to reject these common sense approaches as delusional rather than explore their discomfort with the unknown and seemingly complex, but very real, other side of the market that many like to pretend doesn’t exist outside their idyllic visions of regenerative futures.
Joining the Dots is uncomfortable in many ways
My work raising awareness about overpopulation makes many of the actors in the environmental movement feel uncomfortable. I ask them, have we not already created enough harsh realities for our young adults to face? We could at least allow them to freely chose to reject child-bearing responsibilities by suppressing pleas for grandchildren and the other pronatalist habits from our past. When I chose not to have children of my own, my mother said ‘who will look after you in your old age?’. Right now, the chances of reaching old age is jeopardised anyway by the existential crisis that we have created. I my mother’s comment as a selfish justification for parenting. We are not all suited to the role of geriatric carer, nor the role of parenting. It is best to provide children and young adults the freedom to focus in a direction that best suits their particular preferences and abilities.
The Moloch Mindset
Our socio-economic model is constructed on a set of self-defeating incentives which Shannon describes in this article: When Your Data Pipeline is Compromised: A Ground-Level View of Why Climate Science Isn’t Creating Change. He reveals how we are all engaged in a negative-sum game where individuals and groups sacrifice long-term sustainability, ethics, or collective well-being for immediate gains. I wrote an article in 2024 which describes this predicament in more abstract terms. An Anti-Moloch Mindset | LinkedIn also on Medium.
I am now starting to see people who are helping managers to make the shift in mindset. This post from Jeremy Thomas, and this one from Charly Cox.
Paradigm Shifting
Thank you to Shannon Dobbs for sharing with me your experiences within the ongoing paradigm shift from unnecessary waste to sustainability. I have adapted much of the material from your private texts and emails to me, to ‘author’ this article. I hope that it will inspire your critics to reconsider your imaginative ideas and respect your ingenuity. Your ability to think outside the constraints and assumptions that are still taught through our mainstream media and our education system will help other. Our education was hijacked long ago by the industrial revolution and growth economics, as Sir Ken Robinson explains in this excellent animation from the Royal Society Of Arts.