The multileveled complexity of these materials is referred to as an ordered hierarchical structure, which seems to be nature’s second trick of the trade. From the atomic level all the way to the macroscopic, precision is built in, and strength and flexibility follow.

“Many pests tend to specialize on one host plant species, so when there’s a diverse mix, pests have a harder time finding their target plant.

The gurus for this kind of niche-shift will be people who have studied the places we want to go. Systems ecologists like Howard T. Odum have studied the food chains in a prairie or estuary or bottomland and then drawn diagrams of energy flows and fluxes.

he drew up a list of all the crops he could think of, separating them into either annual or perennial, herbaceous or woody, vegetative or seed/fruit yielding.

James Drake and Stuart Pimm of the University of Tennessee study what it takes to arrive at an assembly of species that remain in equilibrium, a condition farmers would obvously want for their domestic prairie. Unlike The Land staff, they do their experiments with ecosystems in a computer (artificial life) and with aquatic organisms in glass tanks

Cornell University ecologist David Pimentel reckons that society spends ten kilocalories of hydrocarbons to produce one kilocalorie of food.

Paul Hawken thinks we’ve had it backward. Instead of taxing good things like income, Hawken would like to see government tax bad things like pollution or excessive use of energy or virgin materials. Taxing fuels based on their carbon content, for instance (more carbon is more damaging), would encourage use of low-polluting fuels like natural gas in

Type III species (the ones that will inherit the site and remain dominant until the next big disturbance) do more with less. They are designed to stay on the land in a state of relative equilibrium, taking out no more than they put in.

On a quarter acre, he will reap twenty-two bushels of rice and twenty-two bushels of winter grains. That’s enough to feed five to ten people, yet it takes only one or two people a few days of work to hand-sow and harvest the crop.