The Christmas Torches of Abbadia: Sustainable Resource Management According to an Ancient Traditions

This clip is my first attempt at a video on the subject of this blog, resource management. The results are, well, not so great: it is dark and the audio is not very good. I'll see to do better next time, but it seems to me that the clip is at least understandable and it gives some idea of the atmosphere of the torch burning festival of the town of Abbadia San Salvadore in Italy. In the video, I make some comments on the reasons for this tradition, but you can also read the text, below. Many thanks to Viola Calignano for filming.

An ancient tradition of the town of Abbadia San Salvadore, in Tuscany, involves a spectacular festival of wood burning that takes place the night before Christmas. This year, 28 wood torches ("fiaccole") went up in flames, most of them several meters tall and burning well into the next morning. I was there, guest of a family of Badenghi, the way the inhabitants of the place call themselves.

The event was truly fascinating, not a spectacle for tourists but something deeply felt by the locals. It is said that this tradition goes back to more than a millennium ago, to the times of Charlemagne. But why celebrate Christmas by burning so much wood to heat nothing in particular? I have to say that I found the question perplexing, considering that I often try to explain to people that biomass burning is not a solution to the energy problem. But then, after some head-scratching, I think I understood the reasons for this tradition. 

First of all, there is a certain fascination in seeing things burning. I think this is something that goes back to our paleolithic ancestors and that we still carry in our genes. But it is more than that. The Abbadia tradition is, actually, something akin to the "potlatch" of the North-Western native Americans. You probably know what a potlatch is, but let me report a description from Wikipedia, here.

 A potlatch involves giving away or destroying wealth or valuable items in order to demonstrate a leader's wealth and power. Potlatches are also focused on the reaffirmation of family, clan, and international connections, and the human connection with the supernatural world.

Clearly, this is a perfect description of the Fiaccole festival in Abbadia San Salvatore. It is a form of potlatch, where people demonstrate their wealth by wasting some of the resources that make them live, wood.

Think about that from the perspective of what Abbadia must have been during the Middle Ages. It is a town that sits on the side of the wooded Amiata mountain, surely inhabited mainly by woodsmen -- many people there are still woodsmen. Of course, cutting wood never made anyone rich, but for centuries it could provide a living to the families of Abbadia. 

Now, imagine yourself as a medieval woodsman: your life can only be very basic according to modern standards. You probably won't ever have, nor even see, a lot of money and your chances to buy things are very limited. Still, you are human and therefore a social animal. You want to show that your family is on a par with the others in terms of wealth. And you do that using this form of potlatch.

Note that a potlatch is possible only when the social structure of the place is not excessively unbalanced. High social differences would make the game strongly competitive with the doubly bad result that it would humiliate those at the bottom of the ladder and -- worse -- force everybody to destroy more than what they can afford to destroy. It is possible to have a wood-burning potlatch in Abbadia because the woods are managed mainly as a commons, in a rather egalitarian manner. Note also that there are strict rules limiting the size of the torches, that prevents people from overplaying their cards in the game. The idea is that every family should bring a log to the pile, but no more than that. It is, again, a way to avoid that the rich could humiliate the poor.

So, with Abbadia we have a good example of how natural resources can be reasonably well managed in the form of "commons." You remember that Garrett Hardin had spoken of the "tragedy of the commons" supposing that greed would always lead people to overexploit whatever is available to them. It doesn't happen in the real world, at least among peasants and woodsmen. Elinor Ostrom got a Nobel prize in economics for having studied exactly this subject and shown how local communities usually manage the commons well, as they do in Abbadia. 

Yes, but things are completely different if we move to larger scales, worldwide. There, we see Hardin's tragedy in full swing. We are burning fossil hydrocarbons at the fastest possible rate, we don't seem to be able to find another way to keep up with the joneses except in terms of consuming more than they do. It is as if we were thinking we can show we are richer by burning our home faster. And that happens not just at the level of families, it is at the level of entire nations. When President Trump speaks of "energy dominance" he means exactly that: the US is trying to show that it is more powerful than its neighbors by burning its oil resources faster than anyone else -- and destroying them in the process. It is potlatch in its purest form, gone out of control. We are burning everything.

Will we ever learn to manage our resources in a more rational way? Maybe it just takes time -- I am sure that it took time to arrive to manage the burning piles of Abbadia in a sustainable way. In the worldwide case, though, maybe we'll have to learn by going through one of those collapses that teach you things the hard way. Not pleasant, but maybe unavoidable.


And here are some more photos of the Abbadia Festival.

First, a photo that shows the process of the lighting of one of the torches, it is not easy and the photo gives an idea of the size of the pile.

Here us yours truly, Ugo Bardi, together with one of the "Capi-fiaccola" (torch-masters) charged with watching the tower while it burns and to make sure that nothing goes wrong and that nobody gets burned.

And, finally, me again together with a local denizen of the town, Manuela, a member of an ancient family of Abbadia. She told me that her father is a "capostipite," an honorific title in the cooperative that manages the woods around the town.

h/t the Calignano family

The mind of empires: the story telling approach to strategy

This video is making the rounds on the Web. Here, Mr. George Friedman speaks of strategic matters in Europe and argues that the objective of the United States is to contain Russia in order to maintain their world empire. (note: this video has been removed from youtube after the publication of this post, but you can still find it at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ekiJVXba_o0

What is that motivates governments in taking decisions that so often turn out to be tragically wrong? The problem is that we have no data on the inner functioning of most governments; that is, we don't know what leaders say to each other when discussing in private. We can, however, have some idea on the way of thinking of governments if we look at the public pronouncements of that category of "experts" that go under the name of "strategic advisers".

I have no direct experience in military matters, but I do in a field that is just as strategic; that of the energy supply and, more in general, the supply of mineral commodities that makes a country's economy function. In this field, I have encountered several specimens of the category of the "policy advisers" who are supposed to whisper wisdom in the ear of the world leaders. These people tend to use a story-based approach; something that I would define as "story telling based strategy."

I have already reported how someone who advised the Spanish government described the world's oil market in purely narrative terms; giving roles to each major producer and having them play in the great theater of the world. And his narration was totally unencumbered by facts and data. The clip shown at the beginning of this post has a very similar style. Mr. Friedman's epistemology of international matters seems to be based on a basic narrative concept: major world governments are given roles and then they are described as playing these roles in the world theater. The resulting play is not encumbered by data; it is, after all, pure narrative; story telling based epistemology. 

Least you accuse me of speaking without data myself, let me bring up at least one historical example of this approach. I can picture in my mind a cabinet reunion of the Italian government at some moment, in late 1941. I can imagine Mr. Mussolini standing up and saying, "You know, guys? I have an idea: we should declare war on the United States!" And everyone in the room nods and says, "Yeah, great idea, chief! Let's do that!"

What led the Italian government to take this disastrous decision? I think it can be explained in terms of the narrative models that they had in their minds. The documents we have from that time tell us that, in their minds, the dominant narration was that the Mediterranean Sea was an Italian lake. The US - as they saw the situation - had no more interest in controlling the Mediterranean Sea than Italy had in controlling the Gulf of Mexico. I don't know if Mussolini was influenced by some policy advisers in developing this narration, but it is clear that he and the whole Italian government badly misjudged the quantitative factors involved; that is the tremendous US military potential in terms of the human and natural resources it could muster.

Do you think this example is an exception? I don't think so. Imagine a reunion of the Japanese government, also in 1941, with someone standing up and stating: "gentlemen, it is obvious that if we attack the Americans at Pearl Harbor, they will surrender to us immediately afterward.." Their story telling models cast the Americans as weaklings who could be easily intimidated. Again, lack of quantitative data on the extent of the US human and natural resources led to disaster.

There are several more recent examples of monumental mistakes made by governments; we could discuss more of them, but it seems that the concept that government officers work on the basis of narrative models can explain most of what has been happening in the world. And, if they continue in this way, God knows what kind of new monumental mistakes will be made.

Mr. Friedman's speech is a good example of a narrative (unencumbered by data) that could shape the strategic thought of a government. It cannot be understood simply from the clip which is making the rounds on the Web. The complete speech is not just about warmongering, it is not simply an imperial advocacy speech (in part it is, though). It is a fascinating speech that deserves to be listened at. The problem with this kind of speeches that the fascination of story telling hides the ugly details of reality. There is no mention in the speech about the fact that not even an empire can plan wars without worrying about where it can find the resources needed. To be fair, Friedman does mention that if Germany and Russia were to form an alliance, they would have the resources to challenge the American Empire. But he never seems to wonder where the resources that created and maintain the American Empire are coming from right now and for how long they can keep coming. For instance, when he mentions oil prices, he says that low prices are "the new normal". And that, I think, says a lot the limits of storytelling as a guide to understand the world. (To say nothing about the lack of any mention about the grim reaper character waiting to go on stage: climate change).

In the end, these narrative models for leaders are just somewhat more sophisticated versions of the ones used by the media for "consensus building". These are based on the simplest and most primitive narrative device we know: "we are the good guys and they are the bad guys". In their public declarations, high level government officers will often follow the media narrative. Occasionally, however, as with these declarations by Mr. Friedman, their inner mental models briefly surface up from the depth of cabinet reunions. Do some governments know what they are doing? Probably yes, but, from the historical record of humankind, it must be a rare condition.

Our curse as human beings seems to be that we keep trying to force the world to behave according to mental models that were developed by our ancestors of long, long ago. Role playing models were probably working well when we were living in tribes of a few hundred individuals. They don't work anymore with those entities we call "states" or "nations", encompassing tens or hundreds of millions of people.  Will we ever understand that we have to base our decisions on reality? Maybe, but we'll have to be taught some more harsh lessons by the real world before we learn.