DE-ESCALATING ECONOMIES OF SCALE
The word “ecosystem” was birthed in 1935, a notion not the least bit novel to the human race nor the planet, yet predictably coined by a British man at the peak of his culture’s empire over the planet. This concept is meant to describe the interconnection of all things within their natural environment, but has been usurped to describe workplaces, economies, sociological groupings, electronics, the internet, and really anything at all that relates to anything else, which is pretty much everything.
“Everything is connected” can feel like a trite and even comical statement in the world of today, but this was arguably a novel concept in the Western world less than 100 years ago, during a time when capitalism was struggling to prove its worth against the equally valid economic structures making a name for themselves then. And while this notion of interconnectivity has grown in importance and become more or less universally accepted, capitalism itself (which has somehow also become more or less universally accepted) acts under the illusion that very little is connected.
This is not to be a piece about plants, or a rant against capitalism, although the plant metaphors will continue and plenty more anti-capitalist sentiment will ensue. Instead, this is to be a plea for recognition, a statement of need, and an observation of an economy in collapse. You may or may not know that I have run a practical plant nursery, Hot Plants, here in New Orleans since 2018. Before that I was co-owner of an urban farm and nursery situation here from 2014 to 2018. Until 2024, there has not been a year in that decade that I have lost money slinging plants. It has never made me rich—I have always needed a second job—but the businesses have always been in the black. Until now. I haven’t misstepped, my business is more known and beloved than ever, I pay attention to my numbers and raise prices minimally, as needed. And yet I have lost thousands upon thousands of dollars this year. And I am far from alone.
I am not ignorant to the plight of everyone around me, of the world in general right now. I know that what I am experiencing is what all small businesses are experiencing, what most individuals are experiencing. It’s inflation, sure, but it’s so much more. What I sell is a luxury (we can argue about edible plants being a luxury but, for the sake of the thing let’s luxuriate in them for now). Anecdotally, in 2024, when I put out a new non-plant product, like a shirt or a zine, I sell about an eighth of what I would in 2023 or 2022 in the first month of that product’s release. And for what it’s worth, I’ve only raised the prices on most of those products $1 to $3, so the prices ought not to be the thing chasing customers away. People just cannot afford anything right now.
And yeah, this is America and as such, all of us still have things. If we stop shopping, the United States is utterly doomed. So regardless of socioeconomic status, most Americans are living relatively comfortable lives in terms of stuff and things. But we’re also living in extreme debt, technically above our means almost to a person (regardless of socioeconomic status), in order to support this grandiose consumer economy we exist in. It is psychically extremely uncomfortable, and more importantly, utterly crippling actual trade, small businesses, and local economies that reflect the (apparently absurdist) exchange of goods and services in a real life fashion.
Pro-capitalist cheerleaders will continue to proselytize the romantic notion of starting a small business, building from the ground up and growing boundlessly from there, the old bootstrap rags-to-riches American dream. But those same fanatics will literally mock “cottage industries,” that is to say, small businesses that fabricate actual products with intentions towards profit but not exponential growth, as impractical fantasies. Cottage industries should be the backbone of any capitalist economy in theory, but in practice, if you aren’t running your small business with intentions to sell it off to a large corporation, you are failing to participate in the market economy, and you will fail, and you are a fool to have ever believed that “capitalism” meant making a decent living off of the fruits of your own earnest endeavors.
To wit. Individuals are freaking out but still spending money they don’t have, but they’re being careful with it, and careful means less of it flowing into their local economies. Small businesses are also freaking out and spending money they don’t have, and not making their money back, and not making money at all, and collapsing left and right. Not because they are nonviable businesses that the Invisible Hand has deemed unworthy. All actual wealth, actual money, instead of being a tool to spur economic activity between and within society, is just being ongoingly funneled upwards, creating more fake money vis-à-vis ever expansive debt here at the bottom, not to stimulate growth, but to keep on taking.
An obvious metaphor of poorly grown food within the industrial agricultural system has to be inserted here, to ground this rant before it gets too Deleuzian to hold onto. Dirt is chock full of the minerals and nutrients needed to make plants grow, and diverse ecosystems aside, functional interdependent biological systems only make soil richer to make plants grow stronger and richer. It is an inherently self-sustaining, self-growing, happy, healthy system. But throw a plethora of inorganic fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides, and other chemicals into the soil in order to garner exponential growth for a short period of time, and you build vast wealth above ground but leave the soil dead, inhospitable, and incapable of growing anything at all.
We have been ruining the soil that we depend on for some time now, from many angles and with many poisons, and we are seeing the consequences of our actions reflected at us all across society, all across the globe. And I know anyone reading this has felt it in their own lives. I am just trying to share how I have felt and seen it in mine. I can only hope you’re doing what you can, where you can, to nurture the ground beneath your feet and set this world back to rights, for yourself, for all of us.
If you’ve got questions for the Dirt Nerd, feel free to email ian@hotplantsnursery.com or visit @hotplantsnursery.
illustrations by Rachel Speck
