I believe ecology has to be turned into a strong economic factor if we want anything to happen in its favor. Assuming political cooperation, the easiest way I see is to just slap a tax on any and all polluting emissions. That's very much top-down and seems very useful.

> top heavy / top down control

Could you characterise what is meant by this?

I know that achieving some objective 'X' may not be amenable to regulation which says 'you must do X'; but regulation may (in some circumstances, with sufficient thought) alter the situation's dynamics such that greedy self-interest in that environment just-so-happens to coincide with causing 'X'.

What better alternatives are there to "top down control"; do you mean a "vote with your wallet" sort of 'bottom up' pressure?

Centralized, as opposed to decentralized. I would say these farms/farmers are decentralized. There's no gov agency, with some academia pencil pusher in some removed city overseaing them. They've figured it out. And they will continue to do so.

p.s. Team of Teams (book) does a great job flying to decentralized flag.

Not quite. There's plenty of examples in nature of automatons executing simple behaviors without an overseer that lead to tremendous complexity and efficiency.

However, we only see the successful emergent phenomenon, not the failed ones. Also, to this day we can not make accurate predictions of inherently chaotic systems.

So, while a bottom up sysytem may optimize, exactly whatt it optimizes is impossible to discern.

Well. Yes. But I didn't say always. Only that it is (often?) very possible to find solutions in a local decentralized sort of way.