A note from the desk, for anyone whose project has gotten stuck in a way the manual didn’t cover.
There are specialists in this world. People who have spent their lives learning one tool well, and they have earned the right to be trusted with it. When the job fits their hands, you hire them, and you stay out of the way. I am not one of those people, and this piece is not a complaint about not being one. It is a description of the other thing you sometimes need, which I happen to be.
My interests run wide. Robotics. Plants. Rivers. Politics. Old canal cities. Aquaponics. Waste streams. Architecture. Cryptids. Solar arrays. Industrial chemistry. Labor history. Logistics. Photography. If there is a pattern hiding inside a system, I want to find it, and I have never been able to talk myself out of looking. From a distance, that can look like a man who can’t sit still. Sometimes it has been.
But forty years of looking at a lot of different things will give you a kind of eye, and the eye is what I am writing about.
In chess, a kibitzer is the fellow standing behind the players, watching the game. He doesn’t play. He hasn’t trained the way they have. He couldn’t beat either of them sitting down. But every now and then he sees a move the players have missed, because the players are inside the game and he is outside it, and that little bit of distance is sometimes the only thing in the room that can still see the whole board.
I have been that fellow most of my life. Not on purpose. By temperament, and by the kind of work I have done.
I should say plainly what I mean.
I have been working for forty years. Before the Navy I had a run of the jobs a kid takes — retail, fast food, a lunch room, a landscaping crew. In the Navy I was a Radioman, back when communications were physical and breakable and you had to know what was inside the box. After I got out I went into distribution and stayed there a long time. I did every job that industry has — shipping and receiving, sorting, stocking, order picking, forklifts of most every kind, repair on the sorting machinery, supervising the lines, supervising the people. I did graphic design and printing. I did web design. I worked as an insurance adjuster. I was a real estate broker and a property manager. I served as a union steward and then a business agent. Somewhere in the middle of all that I trained in permaculture and practiced it long enough to take its ethics seriously, which is part of why I eventually had to walk away from the community that had taught it to me. These days I am back to being a janitor, which is honest work and gives a man time to think.
That is not a resume. A resume would try to make a story out of it, and there isn’t one. It is a map of rooms. Every one of those jobs put me inside a different way of running things, with its own habits and its own troubles, and I was generally the one in the room who wanted to know why things were the way they were.
What I learned, slowly, was that the rooms are more alike than the people inside them realize. A jam on a sorting line and a snag in a real estate closing are mostly the same jam, wearing different clothes. The way a union local fails its members and the way a property company fails its tenants come from the same family of failures. The radio room, the warehouse, the insurance office — all of them go quiet in the same three or four directions when something is wrong.
You stand in enough of those rooms, the patterns start to lay over each other whether you ask them to or not. And kibitzing, by the way, is how I learned most of it — I watched the experienced hand do the work, asked the question that made him tell me why, and carried the answer to the next room until it told me something new.
The published work — the River Refugium Project, the Bright Meadow Group catalog, the position pieces, the aquaponics research — is the work of a practitioner, not the work of a credentialed expert. I want that on the table. I am not a degreed water engineer. I am not a published academic. What I am is a man who trained in permaculture, kept practicing it after the training ended, and started writing down what I saw when I applied that habit of mind to problems the field had not gotten around to. The RRP documents exist because I got interested in dead zones and would not put it down. The aquaponics work exists because I wanted to understand how to feed myself if the trucks stopped coming. The webzine exists because I have things to say and not much patience for waiting around to be asked.
What that work shows is the head doing the thing — the cross-room habit of mind, trained by the discipline and turned loose on the problems the discipline left on the table, done in public, with my name on it, where any reader can go through and see what I got right and what I got wrong. That is the part you want to look at before you call.
So — what am I good for?
I am not the man you want running a tight, repeatable operation. If the job is procedure, careful patience with the same task over and over, the kind of work where you do not want surprises, there are better people to call. My attention wanders when the work stops being interesting. I get bored with maintenance. I chase the next idea before the last one is finished. A good specialist will out-work me on his own ground every time of the week, and ought to.
But there is a moment in almost every project where things stall. The manual stops helping. The expert says that shouldn’t be happening. Everyone stares at the problem and the room goes quiet. The deliverable is late, the cost has crept, the last consultant’s report was confident and wrong, and the people who are supposed to know are starting to repeat themselves a little louder than they used to.
That is the moment a kibitzer is worth having.
Not because he knows more than the specialists. He doesn’t. He knows differently. He has stood in another room where the same trouble wore a different uniform, and he recognizes the shape of it, and he asks the question that makes the room say out loud what it has been working around for six months.
He doesn’t replace the specialists. They are still the ones who do the fix. He just gets the room moving again.
That is the work. That is what Bright Meadow Group is for.
I work under a method I did not invent. Observe, design, intervene comes straight out of my permaculture training under Alan Enzo and a long stretch of reading Bill Mollison and the people who worked alongside him. It is a farmer’s method, originally — the way an old hand reads a piece of ground before he puts a shovel in it. I have spent the years since applying it to systems that are not pieces of ground. The bones hold up. The observation part is what most consultants skip, because nobody likes paying for it and nobody likes being told they need to sit with the problem a while. The design part is where the cross-room habit shows up, because by then I have seen enough of your particular trouble that the other rooms in my head start to speak up. The intervention part is short and concrete, and most of the time it ends with somebody on your team saying we already knew that, we just hadn’t said it. Which is fine. That is usually what the work is.
I do this for outfits that are mid-project and stuck, for towns and civic bodies trying to write a plan that will survive contact with the ground, and for operators who have read enough of what I have already published to think the head behind it might be worth renting for a week.
I am in Johnstown, Pennsylvania. I work remote, and I travel for site work when the job is the kind that needs a man on the ground. The rates are fair. The published reasoning is sitting there, dated, with my name on it. You can read it before you call.
If you are partway into something and the gears have locked up — if the manual has stopped helping and the room has gone quiet and the next move is not in any of the books on the shelf — you might want a fellow standing behind you asking the simple questions.
Because there is a decent chance that somewhere in the rooms I have worked in, or the things I have read, or the projects I have built on my own time, I have already seen what you are looking at.
Just not where you expected it.
Bright Meadow Group is the systems-design and consulting division of the Cernunnos Foundation. Inquiries through robert@brightmeadowgroup.com
