This puppy doesn’t think it’s possible to have too many vegetables. Photo: snugglepup via Flickr

In these times of economic crisis, rising poverty, and diet-related health problems, you'd think local governments would have bigger priorities than counting the number of squash and broccoli plants on people's lawns. Unfortunately that's not the case for Georgia resident Steve Miller, a landscaper by profession and organic farmer by heart, who's been caught tomato-red-handed growing a downright offensive number of vegetable plants on his property outside of Atlanta. (The exact number of criminal plants unknown.)

Dubbed "Cabbage-Gate" by friends and neighbors of Miller, officials in Dekalb County, Georgia, are suing him for $5,000 in fines for not having his land properly zoned to grow such an apparently ridiculous number of vegetables -- even after he stopped growing them and got rezoned.

If the county is suing this long-time hobby farmer for growing too many vegetables, how many are "acceptable" anyway? Twenty? Eleven? As many as you want as long as that doesn't include cabbage?

Just when I thought life could not get more silly - this!

This weekend I will be talking more about our disconnect with food and the natural world.

My context - Jane Jacobs said that Dark Ages arrive when people forget. When they forget because of a cultural bias how to do important things.

Such as today - how to raise a child - what an education is - how to grow and cook food. All of these things are of course connected in one meta thing that we have forgotten - that we are part of nature and how nature herself works.

We have disconnected from nature and so we have got completely lost.

This weekend I will offer up a few stories of how others are finding their way home - stories that any of us can emulate. For the way home is available - we can remember.

Nature is not random - what appears at first glance to be messy has deep order. This wonderful video reveals much of this. HT Will Pate.

But we tend to organize with no sense of order. That is why so many of our organizations are so dysfunctional.

Take school - what is the theory behind class size? There is none except to have smaller. But no one in Education knows anything about the natural organization of human groups. You will see these numbers in the first minutes of the video.

Why is there bullying in schools? It is not because kids are bad - it is that schools violate the social norms of numbers. Ask a teacher or a Dept of Ed person what are the key social numbers that will ensure that a school will be bully free and they will look at you blankly - they don't know and they dont know that such numbers exist - but they do and have been used fro ever in the military.

All those Social Media "Experts" pushing to have thousands of "friends" It's pathetic. Based on what? They simply think that more = better. What losers! There has to be a numeric structure or its not natural. What is it? It's the same as for all social structures for humans - watch the video carefully.

All those that want to have better functioning organizations of all types - what is your structural plan? Oh yes spans of control! Based on what? Bullshit.

What has happened is that we organize as the Ptolemaic universe was organized - we have a wrong theory (Then that the Earth was the centre of the universe) and we force the world into this fallacy.

The Copernican Revolution of our time (That the Sun is in the Centre of the local system) is that humans are optimally organized as nature intended. That we are designed to live in a Fibonacci sequence where:

8 is the core unit of intimacy

34 is the optimal team to get complex work done

144 is the upper limit of any group that can function in a trust bond

These are the building blocks of trust and high functioning for all humans no matter what culture. They are our nature - as immutable as the laws of light and gravity. We ignore them at our peril.

It is easy to give up hope right now. But for all my Doom Saying - I am very optimistic.

This video will show you why. It is the basis of a book I am writing where I do my best to show that we as a species may be living through the stages of development that a person will.

It is our relationship with Food primarily that drives each stage - with help from our prevailing use of energy and our communication system.

My call is that we are ending our Narcissistic Teen Age and entering the New Parent Age where we Partner with Nature to create the best future of our children.

I was lucky and spoke second - what was amazing was that nearly every talk that followed - none had spoken to each other before - made the point of using Nature as our guide.

This brought tears to my eyes

Rediscovering what they were supposed to already know

May 31, 2010 — Richard Gayle

by TheMarque

1997 Warning on Deep Blowouts: ‘Options Are Limited’
[Via Dot Earth]

It should come as no surprise that experts in avoiding and stopping blowouts of oil and gas wells long ago saw the deep-ocean drilling frontier as particularly dangerous terrain.

[More]

As often happens in human endeavors, people get complacent and take shortcuts. The only way to prevent this is to make sure there is a cultural focus on doing it right. This often means that some people who fail to follow proper procedure need to be tried criminally.

And not just the poor guys on the platform but their bosses who pressured them.

Yep, I’m a liberal because I believe that might actually work. Well, it would actually work if we ever held anyone accountable. Lack of accountability by those in charge has been a hallmark of the last 20 years.

Richard links to an important article on how risk actually works. People naturally drift to cut corners - the O Ring for Challenger - How BP was finishing the well.

If we recognize this, then we have to make the PERSONAL stakes high for drift.

If BP gets hit with a $10 billion dollar fine as is now possible and The Senior Rig folks and Mr Hayward go to jail - we can be assured that there won't be ANY drift in the future.

Test this - your CEO goes to jail if you mess up - how tough will be the safety oversight?