Efficiency logic ignores that leaving harvest for others is wise

Evidence

I once met an engineering student visiting from Europe who told me excitedly about going ricing in Minnesota with his friend’s Ojibwe family. He was eager to experience a bit of Native American culture. They were on the lake by dawn and all day long they poled through the rice beds, knocking the ripe seed into the canoe. “It didn’t take long to collect quite a bit,” he reported, “but it’s not very efficient. At least half of the rice just falls in the water and they didn’t seem to care. It’s wasted.” As a gesture of thanks to his hosts, a traditional ricing family, he offered to design a grain capture system that could be attached to the gunwales of their canoes. He sketched it out for them, showing how his technique could get 85 percent more rice. His hosts listened respectfully, then said, “Yes, we could get more that way. But it’s got to seed itself for next year. And what we leave behind is not wasted. You know, we’re not the only ones who like rice. Do you think the ducks would stop here if we took it all?” Our teachings tell us to never take more than half. — Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass, 648

Categorization

• XREF: The ‘never more than half’ teaching echoes ch39’s rule of knowing each plant’s regeneration limits, and translates gift/restraint logic for the Legal Systems land course. — connects to: Having too-efficient harvesting tools lets people take more than is sustainable — Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom,…, 637; Efficiency is treated as uncontestable truth rather than a contestable value — David Theo Goldberg, The Racial State, 121; People reduce decisions to one value without realizing they have done so (+3 more)
• ADDENDUM: Directly supports the trees-as-infrastructure grafting article: humans as one consumer among many in a living system, taking only a share.

Broader Connections

• Efficiency is treated as uncontestable truth rather than a contestable value #expands (0.85) — David Theo Goldberg, The Racial State, 121
• Leaving cultivated land to waste forfeits one’s claim to it #contradicts (0.85) — John Locke, Second Treatise of Government, 48
• Rationality in social theory attaches to systems and functions, not individual decisions #corroborates (0.80) — Niklas Luhmann, Trust and Power, 308
• Rational self-interest yields collectively disastrous resource depletion #complicates (0.80) — Roderick M. Kramer, Geoffrey J. Leonardelli, Robert W. Livingston, Social Cognition, Social Identity, and…, 2498
• People reduce decisions to one value without realizing they have done so #expands (0.75)