THE POWER OF CLUSTERS
In the preceding pages, we’ve seen how arranging a system as a network of decentralized, self-coordinating parts can bolster its resilience. But if this distributedness is such an effective strategy, why don’t we see this pattern everywhere? Why, instead, do we see so many examples of just the opposite—of clustering? If the Internet, for example, makes it possible for people to collaborate all over the world, why do so many technology entrepreneurs still flock to Silicon Valley? Why do so many artists make their homes in cities like Berlin or New York? In many situations, it seems like density, not distribution, is being selected for.
Such density takes many forms and is expressed at many different scales. We see it, for example, in the powerful, almost gravitational attraction of cities and talent hubs all over the planet. In 2008, the United Nations reported that for the first time in recorded history, humanity became a predominantly urban species, with more people living in cities than in any other kind of habitat; by 2030, the planet’s ranks of city dwellers are projected to swell to almost 5 billion—as many people as were on the entire planet as recently as 1987. Much of that growth is concentrated in Africa and Asia—and not just in gleaming skyscrapers, but in densely packed favelas and informal squatter settlements.
While the rise of vast megacities in the Global South has captured the imaginations and concerns of urban planners, development experts, and businesspeople alike, this urbanization is happening on smaller scales, too. The suburbs of the United States, for example, are experiencing a major reurbanization, as people abandon eight-thousand-square-foot McMansions for smaller, more densely packed living quarters nearer town centers—a trend accelerated by the rapidly growing population of older, less mobile citizens fleeing the burdens of increased energy and transportation costs.
This wave of urbanization concentrates not just people but ideas, skills, and industries, all over the world. Want to make movies in Africa? You’re probably headed to Lagos, Nigeria. Want to develop pharmaceuticals in Asia? You’re probably going to be interviewed in Shanghai. Want to launch a biomedical start-up in the United States? It’s likely you’ll at least make a pit stop along Massachusetts’s Route 128 corridor.
Is all this density a good thing or a bad thing? Is denser better? Or does it heighten fragility? New research is uncovering the answers and revealing the important role such clustering plays in growth, collapse, and resilience—not only of cities, but of many different kinds of organizations and organisms. It’s an unconventional investigation, being led by an unconventional kind of scientist: an urban physicist.
OF MICE AND MUNICIPALITIES
Geoffrey West, born in Somerset, England, in 1940, is reed thin with a distinguished salt and pepper beard. He is often seen wearing a breezy blue striped shirt and white pants—the quintessential sartorial choice of the summering Englishman—but his belt buckle, embedded with small bits of turquoise, reveals a different story. A theoretical physicist by training, West has spent the lion’s share of his career in New Mexico, first working on projects with the Los Alamos National Laboratory and then as a researcher, board member, and finally president of the Santa Fe Institute, a nonprofit devoted to complexity research.
In the late 1990s, while doing research on subatomic particles at Los Alamos, West started to become interested in the scaling properties of biological systems. He wondered: Could the physicist’s tool kit reveal universal laws of growth and scale that applied not just to infinitesimally tiny quarks and gluons, but to a mouse, a human being, or an elephant? Answering such a question would require developing a deep understanding of one of the most complex processes in all of life, and one that we touched on briefly in the last chapter: metabolism.
Though it’s a term bandied about by countless diet gurus and exercise fanatics, your metabolism is not a single thing. Rather, metabolism is a complex series of chemical interactions within the body, often divided into two categories: catabolic processes that break down organic matter—like fat and carbohydrates—to make energy; and anabolic processes that use this energy to construct components of cells such as proteins and nucleic acids. This complex process—often oversimplified to the adage “calories in, calories out”—occurs in all biological organisms, negotiated throughout dense network structures that sustain life at all scales (circulatory, respiratory, renal, neural networks, etc.). Though a plant, for instance, does not have the same superficial design as an elephant, both organisms use a similar network structure to transport nutrients in and to carry wastes away.
West, along with his team of collaborators, including ecologists Jim Brown and Brian Enquist, then at the University of New Mexico, set about creating precise mathematical models of all of these biological networks, convinced that they might lead to a universal understanding of the way biological organisms scale up.
Developing a model comprehensive enough to capture the dizzying variety of all living things was no simple undertaking. West recalls years of meeting with Brown, Enquist, and the other researchers, forming a bridge between the disciplines of theoretical physics and ecology—strange bedfellows in any research endeavor, much less an effort with such an ambitious goal. By the late 1990s, however, their hard work yielded an extraordinary insight: a mathematical model that showed how every single organism in all of biology scales up in a predictable and systematic way.
What does this mean exactly? Consider a mouse. It’s a relatively small organism and, for that reason, it has a fairly high metabolism and a shorter lifespan. Now think of a human being. We have a slower metabolism than a mouse and a much greater longevity: If one of our Paleolithic ancestors made it to the age of fifteen, without the aid of our advanced health care, she might live “naturally” into her midfifties. Now choose one of our planet’s largest organisms—say, an elephant. As one might expect, the elephant has an even slower metabolism and an even longer lifespan. The takeaway is that, in biology, things slow down as they get bigger.
All of this was well established when West and his colleagues took up their research. What West, Brown, and Enquist discovered, however, was that all organisms in biology scale logarithmically—by powers of ten—based on the rate of their metabolism.
“The mathematical models reveal that the pace of life gets slower and slower systematically: An elephant’s heart beats much slower than our heart and our heart beats much more slowly than a mouse,” West told us. “Concomitantly, a mouse does not live very long; we live longer and an elephant or a whale lives even longer. If you use all this to ask about how systems grow, you discover that growth behaves in what we call a sigmoidal fashion, meaning that you start growing quickly and then your growth slows, and then you stop growing when you reach maturity. This all comes out of the theory in a very elegant way.”
West and his collaborators showed that, like natural selection and genetic inheritance, these general scaling laws underwrite all forms of life.
“Scaling laws say that even though the whale is in the ocean, and the giraffe has a long neck and we walk on two legs, these are actually superficialities of design,” West told us. “We are all actually representations of the same abstract thing, just scaled in a very specific nonlinear fashion. It’s truly wonderful. Out of this theory, you can predict all kinds of things. If you perversely wanted to know the blood flow rate in the ninth branch of the hippopotamus’s circulatory system, the model could predict it.”
Based on the success of this first line of inquiry, West started to wonder if these elegant universal laws of scaling extended beyond biological organisms to social organizations like cities and companies. Is New York City really just a great big whale? Is Google an elephant?
To explore these questions, West joined a second, ambitious investigation into the systems that govern cities all over the world. Partnering with such collaborators as fellow physicist Luis Bettencourt and statistician José Lobo, the research team meticulously analyzed millions of data points from cities of every kind: lengths of roadways, lengths of electrical lines, number of gas stations, etc.
Again, the team saw unmistakable signs of universal laws at work. “The bigger you are, the proportionally fewer additional gas stations you need, fewer roads, fewer power lines, but all to the same degree. That was the extraordinary part. It was systematic. It didn’t appear to matter whether we were calculating infrastructure in Japan or Europe or the United States.”
The real insight came when the team correlated these factors with a dizzying array of social, cultural, and economic data: wages, number of patents produced, number of research institutions, number of AIDS cases.
Again, the researchers found universal scaling laws—but with a crucial difference from their biological cousins. In the biological world, scale made organisms slower; in the realm of cities, it made them faster. The bigger the city, the higher the wages were for the residents, the more patents produced there but also the greater the number of violent crimes, the more traffic, etc.
“When you double the size of the city, you produce, on average, fifteen percent higher wages, fifteen percent more fancy restaurants, but also fifteen percent more AIDS cases, and fifteen percent more violent crime. Everything scales up by fifteen percent when you double the size.”
This scaling law proved true in every city they measured—whether that city had evolved in the thirteenth century, the nineteenth century, or at the dawn of civilization. Cities that had absolutely nothing in common culturally, politically, or geographically now seemed to share an identical mathematical scaffolding of scale.
The implications are far-reaching. Unlike purely biological systems, cities are marked by increasing returns from scale—in other words, the bigger a city is, the more it delivers per capita. (This is also referred to as superlinear scaling.) Cities have been selected at the population level because they get more efficient—predictably efficient—as they get bigger and faster: Life in New York is predictably faster than life in Brussels, which is predictably faster than life in San Juan. This helps explain the inexorable allure of cities: They pull us in, and as we add our number to their ranks, we in turn make them larger, more efficient, faster, and even more attractive to others.
Ah—but there’s the rub. Biology’s sigmoidal growth insures that an organism will stop growing when it reaches maturity. (If it didn’t, our world would be filled with animals that dwarf the dinosaurs and creep along for a thousand years.) The growth of cities, however—and superlinear growth in general—doesn’t stop. Not only that, cities grow exponentially, meaning you get some stunning returns on capital creation, but you also have plenty more people to contract disease and create pollution.
Worryingly, West and his colleagues found that, absent any adaptation, systems that follow a single exponential growth curve inevitably collapse. If you live by a single curve—reaping the benefits of a single mode of wealth and capital creation—you can also die an ignominious death by the same single curve. Like the robust-yet-fragile financial markets before the 2008 crash, cities that become overly reliant on just a few forms of value creation can find themselves enjoying a golden age followed by catastrophic decline. (Think Detroit.)
That is, unless you innovate into some new state and restart the clock. Like a surfer, this process requires shifting your board from the wave of one innovation growth curve to catch the even bigger rising wave on the horizon.
“The only way to avoid the collapse is to invent the steam engine, electrical lights, computing, the Internet,” West told us. “The kicker is that, as the pace of life speeds up, the pace of innovation needs to speed up as well. This wristwatch of mine is a big fake. We are not in linear time. Growth and innovation are going faster and faster.”
How do successful cities continue to innovate, reinvent themselves, and leap from one curve to the next, even as the waves come larger and crest faster? The answer is not in their scale, but in their clustering of density and diversity.
Cities are large piles of small, very different things—neighborhoods, networks, innovators, and infrastructure. These tie together different people and groups in loose, informal, ever-shifting affiliations. Think of the more famous passages from storied city dweller Jane Jacobs’s writings, in which the streetscapes of the West Village form a vibrant collage of densely packed interactions, each embodying a genuine diversity: the local news vendor selling papers; the cop on the beat; the commuters coming and going—each represents a complex layer of differing scales and purposes, commingled with one another.
“One of the great things about being in a city is that there are a lot of crazy people around,” West added with his characteristic dry humor. “I suppose that’s another way of saying cities have lots of cognitive diversity. Some of them are the dregs but some are not. They provide a landscape that allows the spectrum of ideas to blossom. As the city grows, this makes it more and more multidimensional. Cities seem to open up: the spectrum of functionalities, job opportunities, connections, etc. That is key to the vitality and the buzz of successful cities.”
It’s this densely packed distributed diversity that lends cities, like the coral reefs we’ve explored earlier, their ability to innovate when one economic or industrial wave crests—it ensures there are always new groups jockeying to embrace the next wave, and different kinds of thinking and capacities are at the ready to deal with the inevitable disruptions that ensue.
This pattern of nested, dense-but-diverse clustering has application in domains well beyond traditional urban environments and modern business. On the other side of the planet, in the remote forests of Indonesia, one passionate conservationist is embracing these design principles in a quest to save the country’s disappearing biodiversity, restore its natural environment, and bolster the human society—and economy—that must live cheek by jowl with both.
CITIES IN THE JUNGLE
It’s a balmy fall day on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, but Willie Smits has been sitting in a dimly lit living room, perched on the edge of a rattan chair, for the bulk of the afternoon. Smits, fifty-four, a Dutch-born forestry expert and orangutan conservationist, is speaking to a group of young ecologists and activists who have come down from Boston to meet with him.
A relentless schedule has taken him, in a matter of days, from Singapore to Amsterdam to Denver to Dallas and then back around to New York City, and his jet lag leaves him looking visibly exhausted. Yet despite his obvious fatigue, Smits can only listen for brief periods of time before launching into bursts of exposition. He offers one detail after another regarding reforestation in Indonesian Borneo—the place he has called home for some thirty years. His voice is measured, his delivery encyclopedic. But when the conversation shifts to focus on illegal wildlife traders and their cruelty to the orangutans, his tone sharpens and he becomes agitated.
“We must get those bad guys.”
The words, almost childlike, spoken in his thick Dutch accent, have a piercing, palpable anger about them. The room grows silent.
“I’ve tried to get them through conservation; I’ve tried to get them through government; I’ve tried to get them through the legal system; I’ve tried all of it. The only thing I have left now is business. We have to make more money doing the right thing than they can make destroying the planet.”
This is what visitors have come to hear about. They settle back into their seats as he launches into a description of his vision—brilliant, complex, and conceived in a mind almost absurdly mechanistic.
“It is all about integration,” he begins.
Smits has been an animal lover his entire life. As a teenager, he used to clean up at local checkers tournaments and use his prize winnings to fund homemade nature films. But he did not initially set out to save the orangutans. After studying tropical forestry and microbiology in his native Netherlands, he traveled to Borneo in the 1980s; there, he fell in love with the remote, tropical landscape and he set down roots to begin a life of scientific research in the rain forest.
Borneo—more than half the size of Alaska—is the world’s third largest island. It is divided into three territories: Malaysia, Indonesia, and the small nation of Brunei. With fifteen thousand plant species, more than two hundred varieties of mammals, and hundreds of species of birds, amphibians, and freshwater fish, the island, like the Great Barrier Reef, is a biodiversity hotspot. It proved a wonderland for a young research scientist like Smits. “Oh, I was very happy back then with my microscope and my eureka moments,” he told us.
One of these eureka moments was a discovery about the role that certain kinds of fungi, mycorrhizae, play in the regeneration of the tropical rain forest. Smits naturally assumed the next step would be to begin the long process of publishing his research in a peer-reviewed academic journal, but in 1989, a chance encounter changed the entire direction of his life and career.
“I was walking through the market when I heard the sound of gasping—dying, really. I turned around to try to see where such an awful sound was coming from and someone shoved a cage in my face. There, before me, were the saddest eyes I had ever seen.”
Smits came face to face with a dying baby orangutan being sold in a cage in the street markets of Balikpapan, in eastern Indonesia. Though they had locked eyes for only a few seconds, for the rest of the day he couldn’t get the animal out of his mind. Later that night he returned to the market and found the baby, barely breathing, tossed atop a garbage heap.
“They managed to salvage the cage,” he noted acidly.
Smits folded the baby orangutan into his arms and broke into a run. The market vendors chased him, demanding money for the dying baby, but he and the infant managed to escape.
Back home, holding the tiny baby that he later named Uce, Smits experienced what can only be referred to as a calling. He nursed baby Uce back to health just like a human baby, holding her and giving her warmth. He promised to keep her and her family safe from the illegal traders who make a lucrative profit capturing orangutans in the wild and selling them off as caged status symbols in both national and international black markets. The promise instantly transformed Smits from a research scientist into a crusader—one with a nearly impossible challenge.
In prehistoric times, orangutans roamed freely throughout Asia, but as human beings came to dominate the planet, our increasing footprint pushed the apes into the few remaining areas of untouched rain forest in Sumatra and Borneo. In the last fifty years, logging, massive annual forest fires, and the wildlife trade have jeopardized their very existence. Now, orangutans—one of the four great apes, including chimpanzees, bonobos, and gorillas—sit near the top of the list of the world’s most endangered species. In nearby Sumatra, their numbers have been halved since 1993; only around 6,500 remain there today. In neighboring Borneo, approximately 50,000 orangutans are left. A UN report released in 2007 estimated that the tropical rain forests in both places were being cleared so rapidly that, without urgent action, in ten years 98 percent will be gone.
Contributing to the orangutans’ fragility is the gentle pace of their individual growth and development. Just like humans, baby orangutans cannot survive in the wild alone without the constant care of their mothers. Orangutan mothers are known for nursing their infants longer than any other mammal on Earth (approximately six or seven years), and the orangutan birthrate (one baby every six to seven years) is one of the lowest on the planet. All of this is due to the lengthy education each infant must receive from its mother to survive in the jungle, learning to decipher the hundreds of different types of edible fruit, bark, and leaves. As the forests are increasingly clear-cut for agriculture, many of the orangutans have moved onto the farmland looking for food; once there, they are often captured or killed by the timber and plantation workers. Orphaned infant orangutans are kept as chained and caged-up pets or traded for lucrative sums on the international black market, where Smits first found Uce.
Back on the Upper East Side, Smits’s meeting with the activists from Boston is winding down. Orangutan figurines of finely carved wood and brass line the mantel of the Manhattan living room—his host is a devoted conservationist—and they serve as talismans for the battle against extinction that is constantly lurking on the horizon. But Smits is clearly frustrated. He doesn’t feel as though he has fully articulated his vision for saving the orangutans. There never seems to be enough time to fully explain how all the pieces fit together, and some of his visitors still look confused. He grows frustrated and starts near the beginning again.
When Smits first nursed Uce back to health, he wanted to create a temporary home for her and others like her until they could be returned safely to the forest. The orphaned infants needed constant care and supervision while the older orangutans—often physically and mentally abused by their owners—required intensive rehabilitation. So in 1991, Smits started the Borneo Orangutan Survival Foundation (BOS), dedicated to the conservation of orangutans and their habitat.
As word of his efforts spread, Smits began to receive other endangered species—not just orangutans—left homeless in the wake of the forest razing. What started out as a temporary way station for orangutans gradually developed into a network of permanent rehabilitation centers for all of the region’s endangered species, a Noah’s ark in the tropics. Over the last fifteen years, BOS has taken in close to two thousand animals for rehabilitation; seven hundred of those are now back in the wild.
Yet, for all these successes, over the last decade, Smits has seen little progress toward rain forest conservation—the underlying reason for the animals’ crisis. If anything, the rampant destruction has accelerated. It started to become clear that orangutans were only one piece in a much larger puzzle that needed to be solved. Though the orangutans were able to adjust, albeit imperfectly, to the increasing human footprint over the last century, nothing prepared them for the recent accelerated annihilation of the forests across Southeast Asia. The cause of the rampant deforestation destroying their home can be explained in two words: palm oil.
One of the world’s leading agricultural commodities, palm oil is used in 50 percent of all consumer goods—everything from soaps and detergents to breakfast cereals and vegetable oil—making it nearly impossible to avoid on the supermarket shelves. If you are reading this book in the United States, it’s all but certain that something you’ll eat today was cooked with it.
The oil is extracted from the pulp of the red fruit of the Elaeis guineensis, the oil palm tree. Grown in monocultural plantations across Southeast Asia, it requires significant cropland for cultivation, which has in turn driven vast deforestation: Between 1967 and 2000, land designated for oil palm plantations in Indonesia skyrocketed more than 1,500 percent, from less than 2,000 square kilometers (770 square miles) to more than 30,000 square kilometers today.
And the trend is accelerating: Spurred by government subsidies over the last few years, European energy companies have started designing generators powered by biofuel derived from palm oil. These biofuels have been falsely touted as a clean alternative to fossil fuels; rising global demand for them has been the motivating force behind an even faster clearing of more huge tracts of Southeast Asian rain forest, along with the overuse of chemical fertilizer.
Even worse, space for the expanding palm plantations is often created by draining and burning peat land, which, in turn, sends huge amounts of carbon emissions into the atmosphere and creates devastating forest fires that can burn for months at a time. New research estimates that 2.5 billion metric tons of CO2 were released into the atmosphere as a result of forest fires in 1997 and 1998. Today, Indonesia ranks behind only the United States and China in terms of total man-made greenhouse gas emissions.
Smits realized that the goal of orangutan conservation was too narrow to address the systemic crisis he was experiencing all around him. It no longer seemed advantageous to try to save one species in isolation. Considering the highly networked nature of the tropical rain forest ecosystem, it could even be detrimental.
“I don’t want to do symptom treatment anymore,” he told us. “I’m trying to get to the heart of the problem.”
To make good on his initial promise to Uce, Smits started to think about ways to intervene in the ecosystem as a whole: engaging with the people, the animals, and the ecosystem as three equally deserving interdependent components of a tightly coupled system.
When he broached this idea with some traditional players in the international conservation community, however, the responses were often chilly. Many of these organizations’ funding channels had been optimized to focus on one charismatic “brand” species. The orangutan people looked out for the orangutans; the leopard people looked after the leopards. Focusing on one single sexy species was a powerful fundraising tool, even if it was an ineffective conservation tool, and the groups tacitly agreed not to get in one another’s way. Taking on the system as a whole meant upsetting these unspoken agreements.
But that wasn’t the only impediment to collaboration. Many longstanding Western conservation organizations had galvanized their supporters around the far cheaper idea of preserving rather than regrowing forest: buying up tracts of land that would be protected from the intrusions of humans and industry.
Creating such reserves is a classic approach to risk mitigation, and it’s far less expensive than regrowing forest from scratch on decimated land. Yet while such mitigation efforts are critical to slowing the degradation of the forests and buying the overall system time, they are not without their problems: If the needs of the people living in and along these tracts are neglected, the political will to maintain preserves can falter over time. In addition, the animals these reserves were supposed to contain often migrate beyond their borders. In areas of Kalimantan in Indonesian Borneo, the phrase “Mana yang lebih penting menyelamatkin orangutan atau kami?” (What is more important to save: orangutans or us?) was an oft-heard refrain in meetings between conservationists and frustrated residents, for whom conservation had become a zero-sum game: “orangutans win” equals “humans lose.”
While many of the more traditional conservation groups were still trying to keep the humans out, Smits came to believe that the only viable long-term solution would require human beings, human enterprise, orangutans, and myriad other species to live together, just as in the overlapping communities of a city. Long-term resilience would require the marriage of viable economic growth with ecological preservation, underwritten by economic models that were designed to encourage reforestation and biodiversity protection—the creation of adaptive capacity.
Smits became a man obsessed by a vision of systemic integration, scribbling down countless notes in journal after journal, often accompanied by engineering designs and system flow charts. But before he could even begin to implement some of these designs, he needed to start with a little gardening. Willie Smits set himself a modest task: He would regrow the rain forest.
He chose the most barren tract of land he could find. The area around Samboja village, considered the poorest district in East Kalimantan in Indonesian Borneo, had virtually no fertility left. The local residents spent 22 percent of their income just to buy water, and close to half of the population was without work. Without any buffer zone of biodiversity, they were subjected to constant floods and fires.
“If I can do this in the worst possible place I can think of, no one will have any excuse to say, ‘Yeah, but . . .’ Everyone should be able to follow this.”
By 2001, Smits had crafted an initial design, something of a hybrid of an urban cluster and lush garden. Instead of planting rows and rows of a monoculture crop like oil palms, he envisioned three rings of mixed forest over approximately 2,000 hectares, or 5,000 acres, of land. The outermost ring would consist of flame-retardant trees that would protect the entire preserve from forest fires. The middle ring would contain mixed forestry: the bulk of the plant diversity in tropical hardwoods and food crops like pineapple and papaya to feed the local people as well as the orangutans. And in the centermost ring, out of reach of the poachers, there would be a preserve where Uce and her family could roam free along with all of the other endangered species under Smits’s charge. If he can pull it off, the regrowth of the rain forest—and subsequent economic benefits provided by the return of the ecosystem services—would present a viable alternative to the destructive, self-replicating platform of the oil palm monoculture.
He christened the project Samboja Lestari, or “Everlasting Forest.”
Smits had spent most of his adult life studying the various trees and plants of the Indonesian forests, so he was uniquely prepared to take on the challenges of rain forest reconstruction. Yet this goal will be impossible without the sustained engagement of the Dayak people, who live with and within the ecosystem. Fortunately, Smits does not undertake this venture as a complete stranger: He has lived in the area for thirty some years, officially becoming an Indonesian national. His wife is a traditional Dayak tribal princess from the Indonesian island of Sulawesi, and he raised his sons in the rain forests of East Kalimantan, speaking several of the local dialects. He is considered a part of the community, so much so that he has been given a Dayak name and he performs regularly with the local Dayak band on birthdays and holidays. “None of this would be possible if I was perceived to be an outsider,” Smits said.
Smits works to retain that trust, starting with paying the local people what they all agreed was a fair price for their land. After each transaction, he was fastidious about making each and every purchase of land compliant with government regulation. He wants to protect his initiative from the corrupting forces of the timber and oil palm mafias—especially if his reforestation plan works and valuable timber reappears on the barren wasteland—so he legally insured that BOS, his conservation group, would hold the rights to the land in perpetuity.
Once the area was safely and fairly secured, the planting process could begin. In the beginning, not a few people thought he was crazy: this large white Indonesian man paying people generous sums of money for land known to be completely barren. When he stood on the desolate scrub that was to become Samboja Lestari for the first time, Smits could not hear a single sound. The tract of burned soil was so bereft that even the insects had fled.
Understanding Smits’s vision of forest regrowth requires thinking systemically, and therefore in a variety of different time signatures. Imagine a conductor in front of an orchestra. One wave of the right hand indicates the start of the prelude (the first layer of forest growth), while a later wave of the left ushers in the rising movement of the forest’s full canopy, the growth of the tallest tropical hardwood trees that will shade the entire forest and capture the humidity that is so essential to the rain forest’s rich biodiversity. Unlike a monoculture, Smits’s approach layers in processes with different scales, different time signatures, different structures—all in a dense, interconnected cluster.
This type of planning, of course, imitates nature’s evolutionary design. As Amory Lovins, expert on alternative energy sources and advocate for Smits’s work, put it, “Nature has had 3.8 billion years of experience at getting multiple benefits from single expenditures: Willie’s work is the extraordinary example of modeling nature and creating this same abundance by design.”
Like a symphony, the first temporal movement of Samboja Lestari’s growth will lay the essential foundation for the full blossoming to follow. Because the barren land had been overrun by an insidious cyanide-producing weed called alang alang, Smits envisions planting the outer ring—or zone—with quickly growing trees that would both protect the land against fire and shade out these weeds. His first layer includes Acacia mangium trees: fairly low value, but fast growing. Along with other fire-retardant trees, they would protect the inner rings and provide shade to encourage the returning microclimates.
“The reason a forest is multilayered is so it can make use of light at different elevations, store more carbon in the system, and then provide more functions,” Smits said. “So, just like in nature, we will plant fast-growing trees and then follow that up with the slower-growing primary forest with a diversity that can optimally use as much of the light as possible, at different times, as it grows.”
Once the acacia trees are growing and offering shade to subsequent growth, his design calls for the cultivation of the middle zone—the proverbial second movement—more than 1,000 hectares intended to contain the bulk of Samboja Lestari’s biodiversity.
In temperate zones—between the Urals and England, for example—there are approximately 165 species of trees. By contrast, in this second zone, Smits envisions a half million trees belonging to more than 1,300 species. His earlier eureka moment involving fungi and tropical forest regeneration served him well: He has used his discoveries to create specially designed compost with microbiological agents made from sugar, food waste, sawdust, cow urine, and (what else?) orangutan excrement. Every tree planting will get a hearty dose of this compost to enrich the nutrient-starved soil. Smits plans to transplant approximately 150,000 saplings from his nursery. They will be integrated into the mixed forest—layered over time—as soon as the soil is enriched enough to sustain their growth.
“Nature is able to recover from almost anything because of its biodiversity: the structural biodiversity and the species biodiversity,” Smits says. “This is the underlying basis of resilience in systems. We must find a way to replicate that if we have any chance of survival.”
Because the growth of these second-zone tropical hardwood trees can take anywhere from ten to fifteen years to reach full canopy, Smits intends to use the land alongside the planted saplings for food crops. Papaya, lemons, pineapples, watermelons, beans will be planted—then later, chocolate, chilis, coffee, and other crops will cycle in a new rotation of plantings. BOS will buy the farmer’s surplus to feed the orangutans and other wildlife in the inner-zone preserve, bringing the farmers an additional source of income.
Once the first and second movements have been achieved, Smits will be able to focus on the innermost zone of 300 hectares: the wildlife sanctuary, animal nursery, and a forest research facility. There, the healthy orangutans will be released into the preserve along with other wildlife species. Orangutans that require isolation—those suffering from hepatitis and other diseases—will live in groups on manmade orangutan “islands.”
Step inside the mind of Willie Smits and see what he sees: years and years of forest regrowth across Samboja Lestari—the “Everlasting Forest”—occurring in mere seconds. The fast tempo of the first movement, the acacias, met by the slower, rising tide of the tropical hardwood species. Enter the staccato rhythms of the food crops and a baseline of the micronutrients enriching the soil. Although it appears like a naturally occurring rain forest, this controlled growth is as considered as an eighteenth-century French garden. Like the urban plan for New York City, it accommodates many different spheres of life in a single dense, diverse layered system—Jane Jacobs in the jungle.
Finally, it will be time for the third and final movement: the crescendo—the financial engine that will make the entire system economically viable. In order for Smits to design an alternative to the palm oil economy, he must integrate a crop into Samboja Lestari that can viably compete with palm oil’s productivity. Fortunately, Smits has a powerful candidate, one he has spent the last thirty years studying: Arenga pinnata, commonly known as the sugar palm.
“When I married my wife, the ritual dowry to marry a young bride from her tribe was six sugar palms. I asked myself, How can I marry such a lovely girl for just six sugar palms? I started doing loads of research and I really saw the potential of this incredibly productive plant.”
A. pinnata is the Swiss Army knife of palm species. Its most important and well-known product is a sweet sap called saguer, used as a drink and as the raw material for sugar production, but there are dozens of other uses for the tree’s various parts, ranging from food to roofing materials. Better still, the plant is not flammable, so the sugar palm could bolster the ring of fire protection around Samboja Lestari. And, the pièce de résistance for any conservationist, A. pinnata will grow only in a mixed forest.
“Sugar palms couldn’t be more different from oil palms,” Smits said. “To begin with, they only grow in the degraded land of a secondary forest. And they can only survive in a polyculture. If you try to grow them in a monoculture, they turn yellow and die. This is one of the main reasons why they haven’t been invested in yet. The big companies want to have big areas with total control. They want a very simple, scalable system, but sugar palms don’t grow that way.”
Smits has been fascinated with the multifunctioning plant ever since that first encounter in his wife’s village. Its versatility combined with its low-maintenance growth—unlike an oil palm, A. pinnata doesn’t need any fertilizers or pesticides—were reason enough to consider incorporating it into Samboja Lestari. Smits, however, had his eyes set on a bigger prize: He was convinced that, with the right processing, the sugar palm could produce ethanol—the fuel extracted from the chemical compounds of sugar. If his hunch proved correct, not only would Samboja Lestari achieve successful forest and wildlife regeneration, it could also provide a sustainable alternative energy source and provide wealth for its human inhabitants. Because, unlike the corn-based biofuels being developed here in the United States, the sugary sap of A. pinnata is not coupled with the food production system, so using it for fuel would not impact the food supply, the underlying cause of a crisis like the tortilla riots. The sap can be extracted from A. pinnata without destroying the tree. The sugar palm is basically a self-sustaining biological machine for converting and storing solar energy as sugar: It needs only rain, CO2, and sunlight to produce more juice, all of which are available in surfeit in the tropics. In Smits’s vision, a series of mixed forestry systems cultivating A. pinnata for biofuel could scale beyond Indonesia without compromising food security in some other unrelated corner of the globe. And all of this, in turn, could help save the forests for other endangered species, like his beloved orangutans.
But it almost goes without saying: The more beautiful the vision, the more complicated the execution. Before even beginning to integrate sugar palms into the system, Smits needed to solve a fundamental problem: the sugar sap’s rapid fermentation. Because the sugary juice begins to ferment almost immediately after being exposed to the air, Smits needed a technology that could collect and process it closer to the trees—a portable sugar-processing factory.
Smits turned to the tappers of Sulawesi, a neighboring island several hundred miles from Samboja Lestari, where local men had been tapping the sugar palm for thousands of years, to learn more about how traditional sugar processing was done.
The results were a mixed bag. Twice a day, these tappers climb high up into the sugar palm trees to cut into the vessels of the plant at just the right angle. Although this process can be time-consuming, A. pinnata requires little additional maintenance in exchange for its productivity. In fact, the more it is tapped, the more sugary sap it produces.
Traditionally, these tappers would use firewood as the energy source to transform the resulting sugar palm juice into pure sugar. This garnered a small profit for the tappers but it also presented a whole host of new problems for the local people. Sugar processed over the fires had a limited market, as it was often poorly stored and contained contaminants from the processing such as bees and fire ash. With no standardized procedures, the quality was inconsistent from tapper to tapper. Much of the unsold sugar was then made into a moonshine the local people referred to as “the Potent Spirit”—a high-octane, inexpensive intoxicant readily accessible to the unemployed men in the village.
But the most damaging effect of existing sugar palm processing methods was the fires themselves. Wives and daughters of the tappers spent long hours searching for enough timber to make a fire big enough to process the sap. This stole time away from their families and other more potentially productive tasks. It also added to the large-scale devastation of the forests and led to chronic respiratory and vision problems for the women and girls who sat day after day in smoke-filled huts.
Based on what he learned in Sulawesi, Smits was able to design a small prototype portable sugar-processing factory that was more energy efficient, cleaner, and safer to use. Then, in 1996, Smits happened on a piece of exceptionally good luck: A power company called Petramina started operating in the nearby area of North Sulawesi. Its plants powered by geothermal heat, Petramina struggled to find a use for its waste heat, in the form of excess steam. Smits realized that he could use this steam—piped into his portable sugar-processing factory—to heat the pans used for sugar production and thus completely eliminate the need for fire and firewood. Petramina was thrilled by the offer: In exchange for supporting an ecologically beneficial effort, the detour through Smits’s factory would cool their steam back into more useful liquid water.
Instead of burning wood for fuel, steam now converted the sap to sugar, saving an estimated 200,000 trees a year. With thousands of liters of sap processed in the factory every day, the cooperative could manufacture a consistent palm sugar product for export. And, best of all, by including a yeast fermentation process, the geothermal heat allowed Smits to extract ethanol from the sugary juice. As a result, the families involved in the cooperative gained access to both fuel and electricity.
The prototype sugar-processing factory was initially so successful in North Sulawesi that Smits envisioned a mini version of it to be delivered to Samboja Lestari by helicopter in three modular pieces. Instead of geothermal steam, the minifactory—dubbed “the Village Hub”—would be powered by solar panels.
“In the tropical regions, we still have vast amounts of land, but we don’t have jobs, so we have to look at simple, ecological, sustainable systems that are going to be based on what can be produced,” Smits said. “There are ways to provide energy from this tropical belt where you have all this rainfall, all this land, all these people, and the right climate in terms of solar radiation. But we need technologies like the Village Hub that can function as an integrated unit.”
Smits’s goals may be rooted in conservation ecology and social justice, but he is hard-nosed about the economic and political realities. He’s relentlessly focused on making his system profitable—including patenting the underlying technologies involved.
“I didn’t want to give the hub away because every time we gave technology away, the big companies would try to squeeze as much money out of it as possible. I don’t want the corporate social responsibility model anymore: Make a lot of money and just a little goes back to the local people and everyone has to get down on their knees to say thank you. I don’t want to work that way. Our model guarantees that a real income for local people is built into the model.”
In order to insure that this happens, Smits envisions a franchise structure. Everyone using his technology would have to agree to strict guidelines for the cooperative—protected by Dutch law—all guaranteeing that the profit returns to the local people. Each family that opts in to Samboja Lestari would commit to conserving the environment by protecting the forest’s biodiversity. In exchange for their commitment, the families could then make a living from the forest’s ecosystem services.
Everything about Samboja Lestari’s plan is interwoven into everything else: the quintessential example of a zero waste system. So much so, it can be difficult to describe its many flows and cycles in a linear way. “The whole system is elaborately and intricately interlinked to get the most social, ecological, and economic benefits,” Amory Lovins says. “I think it’s the best model in the world for what we all need to be doing in our respective endeavors.”
It accomplishes this by embracing the very themes we’ve been speaking about until this point: Like the city, the design of Samboja Lestari is a cluster, at once dense, diverse, and distributed. It can be connected to the global economy (through the global market for biofuels) but is also decoupled from it. It links immediate economic transactions that benefit the Dayak people to slower patterns that are needed to ensure the long-term viability of the orangutans and the even longer ones needed to restore the forest ecosystem.
And, according to Smits, it’s scalable: he believes the three-ring repeating pattern can be replicated at many sizes, as sugar palms can thrive in any place that has more than 750 ml of rainfall and sits at an altitude of less than 200 meters. Smits imagines thousands of Samboja Lestaris linked up across Indonesia, across the tropics even—three-ringed densely mixed forest gardens sustained through the productivity of the sugar palm. “Scale is not the enemy, only the wrong kind of scale,” says Smits.
The Samboja Lestari that exists in the mind of Willie Smits is breathtaking in its ambition: an integrated system design that treats human beings, other species, and the ecosystem as co-equal participants in a whole. Yet the reality on the ground is still a prototype in progress. The challenges that must be surmounted if it is ever to be more than that are daunting.
First, Smits must overcome the resistance of mitigation-focused conservationists who argue that rebuilding the forest is too expensive and does not deliver enough bang for the buck. Smits is the quintessential embodiment of an adaptationist; he has seen the wide-scale destruction of the forests across Borneo and he knows there is little time left. The car, to return to an analogy from the Introduction, is tottering on the edge of the proverbial cliff. But if Samboja Lestari can be made to work, Smits believes, it could provide the “air bags” for the system, in the form of renewable energy systems and initiatives for forest regrowth, all the while widening the basin of possibilities for the Dayak people and getting the orangutan’s “parachutes” open.
Smits has also drawn criticism from some quarters for not publishing more scientific data about his efforts, leading some in the field to question the impact of what’s actually been accomplished. As befits a man with an evangelist’s zeal and a sense that time is short, Smits’s response to these critiques has largely been to ignore them.
Other concerns cannot be so easily dismissed. For Smits and Samboja Lestari to succeed, he must navigate the extremely complex waters between private and civic interests, keep the local community committed and engaged, raise the resources to nurture the project during its years-long path to fruition, and maintain momentum through the inevitable failures and reversals that come with tackling anything this comprehensive. Doing so sometimes requires Smits to be in more than one place at the same time and sometimes calls on him to assume many roles—businessman, activist, scientist, social leader, and storyteller—that can be in conflict. He has a reputation as a brilliant, almost insanely dedicated solo operator, and his vision, unlike the emergent, cross-pollinating innovation that West describes, is entirely centrally planned. For Samboja Lestari to fulfill its promise it will take a whole community of equally dedicated, and equally empowered participants and supporters, who can make—and remake—it anew. And it will call upon Smits to demonstrate a very specific form of leadership, which we’ll explore in greater depth in chapter 8.
Finally, while Samboja Lestari represents a daring vision, we must be careful not to fetishize it as an endpoint in itself. If it succeeds, it will not restore some sacred balance or achieve a stasis under glass that freezes the relationships between its constituents. Rather, it would restore the eroded capacity of the human community, economy, biodiversity, and ecosystem to contend with unanticipated future disruptions. In Samboja Lestari, Smits and the Dayak people hope to find not an answer for every possible calamity, but a system that can give them a wider array of future choices when one of those calamities arrives.
Smits seemed energized by the challenge. “A lot of people are afraid of the complexity, but we have to embrace it. It can’t be in a single species, block by block. That is the big mistake that modern agriculture and forestry are making. They are always chasing the biggest profit and looking for the quickest exit strategy. Well guess what? There is nowhere new to go anymore. Exit to where? We only have what we have. We need to work with it, for everyone’s sake.”
• • •
Like most systems, Samboja Lestari’s long-term viability and resilience will begin and end with the choices and commitments people make, their individual and collective responses to change, and their ability to work together. And so it’s natural to now turn to the next part of this book, in which we’ll explore the roots of resilience in people, groups, organizations, and communities.
Our journey in the chapters to come is organized along increasing levels of scale. We’ll begin with the underpinnings of personal resilience—how might we enhance individuals’ capacity to bounce back psychologically in the face of potential trauma? Then we’ll examine the contours of group collaboration in the face of disruption—how do we get people to work together when it counts? We’ll also explore how to enhance the cognitive diversity of such groups—how do we ensure we consider the widest array of options? Then we’ll look at how certain kinds of leaders can amplify the resilience of entire communities. We’ll end by offering some thoughts about what these lessons might mean for society as a whole.