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Too Wet or Too Dry? A High-Contrast Comparison
These two photos really sum up the difference between “natural” systems and systems that have been disturbed via human activity for the purposes of conventional agriculture. While one of these systems routinely grabs media attention, the other system continues happily without even being mentioned.
The two photos were taken June 3rd and June 5th.
Where did all the water go?
One of these systems is designed to hold water.
One of these systems is designed to lose water.When we remove the life from the land, we get consequences: we lose water rapidly through the exposed surface, we lose soil itself to wind or water erosion, and we get increased temperatures from the sun baking the hardened surface. We pray for rain to save our crops.
Nature does not know when water may or may not be coming next: She has designed methods to hold onto as much of it as possible, for as long as possible. We can learn these principles and these methods.
I know which picture I would rather be in.
Graham
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Capturing Carbon
Have you ever looked at any climate data?
Most of us, probably have not. Many industries take advantage of this knowledge gap to sow disinformation, whether it be fossil carbon industries, forestry industries or agricultural industries.
The new report released by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change [1] has compiled data (a lot of it), and reveals precisely why industries like these ones work so hard to shift the narrative and our focus away from the problem at hand, into a zone of frivolous debate.
Summarized in this chart for policymakers, [2] the #1 actionable thing we can do right now is to reduce conversion of natural ecosystems. As stated in the previous post, many of these industries that rely on destroying the environment for profit have successfully convinced many policymakers that their industries are “sustainable.” Combined with improving sustainable forest management, there is no better thing we could possibly do than to simply let nature be and help nature be. But how does this help our atmosphere cancer problem?
Often it feels like the media and popular culture believe there are (or will be) magic technological solutions to this issue of radical increases to atmospheric Carbon…perhaps there is some “Carbon capture” technology that could help us deal with the issue.
There is nothing better that humans could possibly invent that is more efficient at capturing Carbon than….nature.
In fact, nature is designed to do this very thing.
The brilliant and incomparable design of nature, where every living creature plays an ecological function, is centred around Carbon: A tree splits Carbon away from a pair of Oxygen molecules, uses the Carbon to build its structure, and gives the rest of it to the underground microbial world. A grass does the same photosynthetic trick, and when an animal (perhaps a Bison) comes to graze the grass, the plant is damaged, and in being damaged, it increases its photosynthesis to build new tissue, and in doing so, discharges more Carbon into the ground to inspire microbial and fungal support.
We humans are excellent at interrupting this “Carbon capture technology”: we cut the trees down, we spray chemicals to make sure only what we decide is best for industry grows there, and we have removed nearly every grass-grazing animal from every grassland available, replacing sprawling grasslands with near-infinite sections of monoculture commodity crops, often managed with an ever-evolving arsenal of chemical concoctions designed to kill things.
Capturing and drawing down Carbon is what ecosystems are designed to do. They’ve been doing it for hundreds of millions of years, co-evolving with fungi and the microbial world in order to move Carbon from the air, to somewhere that is not the air. It does this every day, as long as the sun is shining.
There is no more elegant solution to the beautiful movement of Carbon than what has been designed by nature and evolution.
“Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed.” Francis Bacon (Novum Organum, 1620). There are many a great philosopher with astute and profound observations of the natural world. It seems that in our times, the philosophy of observing nature or holding her in reverence and wonder has been rejected, in favour of the idea that we as humans can control our environment by eliminating nature without consequence.
Graham
thanks to everyone reading
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Lobbying For Unsustainable Forests
During the last week I was forwarded an alarming news item published by CBC stating that the Canadian Government had been lobbying other countries, such as the US, to limit what counts as “sustainability.”[1]
Like many industries, and especially Forestry, have broadly succeeded at convincing people their industries are “sustainable.” It seems perfectly reasonable on the surface that Forestry is “sustainable,” after all, you can of course, plant another forest. This successful marketing tactic relies on omission of the reality of biology, nature, and the actual facts about how this industry operates, as well as the degree to which governments are involved in making sure capital generated from the destruction of our Carbon sinks continues flowing to the right people.
As the CBC article indicates, Canada ranks third in global deforestation, and no letter from the former Premier of Alberta is going to change that fact. Especially after the former Premier of British Columbia willingly allowed a forestry company to cut down 1000+ year old trees in his own riding, with only 2.7% of coastal ancient forests left intact.[2] Photos of the devastation of what remains after these epic monuments to the beauty and perseverance of ecosystems are destroyed are well documented by photographer TJ Watt. [3]
Are we to believe this is a sustainable practice? Cutting down ancient trees that had been successfully sequestering Carbon for more than a thousand years Fern Gully-style and calling it necessary for profits might strike you as a little bit ludicrous. As it would also be if you found out that the forestry industry also sprays millions of hectares of newly-planted monoculture forests with Glyphosate (Round-Up), using airplanes to douse vegetation, all with government approval. The government, when asked to conduct a review of this practice, responded that it was “not warranted.” [4]
In a time of climate crises and ecological collapse, it seems even more ludicrous that our political system works in favour of these companies…But we don’t need to analyze this political nonsense of lobbyists and governments gaslighting the public for their own agendas.
The incomparable beauty of these forests is breathtaking.
How does a tree live for over a thousand years, trees that started as seedlings at some point during the Roman Empire? These trees and more broadly, the implications of the ecosystems they foster to support them, is such a well-designed system that it has been running undisturbed for dozens of human generations.
The design of nature is astounding. It is itself sustainable, requiring no outside inputs or disturbances. It rises and swells and declines and dies and retributes on its own. In the agricultural world, a widely held belief is that plants “suck” the nutrients “out of the soil,” a direct by-product of the chemical input mindset.If we look at an ancient tree system however, we can see that assumptions like those couldn’t possibly be true.
In some remarkable studies, rather recent, (2009-2010), done by some incredible scientists, it was found that networks of trees in only a 30×30 metre plot, a single tree had 47 connections to other trees. Direct, underground connections. The people working on these studies show that there is an intricate and amazing web of fungi and microscopic soil ecology that is supporting and pushing and pulling with the flow of nature in these ancient environments.[5]
These systems cannot be replaced by sending small armies of tree planters to install industry-favoured crops, and they cannot be understood by bulldozing what remains of a tiny viable area of 2.7%. They cannot be regenerated if the time frame is on such a scale that to future generations of humans “Twitter” would be a mere footnote in the history book of the Internet. They cannot be rebuilt if the industry plans to simply harvest again in decades.
We cannot be sustainable with our industrial practices if we actively ignore and fight the beauty that the natural world has gifted us to make a short-term profit. No amount of lobbying can change that fact.
The power of true sustainability lies in understanding the incredible design that nature has provided. The same design that we are an intricate part of, the same design we were born from: the same design that we are continuously destroying.
A walk in a forest is a truly incredible thing.
Grahamsubscribe for forestly fresh posts every Wednesday in your inbox
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Nature as Generational Knowledge
Recently I was asked what challenges faced vegetable farmers today.
This is was interesting to think through. In a day-to-day sense while farming, there are many obvious challenges, such as weather conditions, or how to manage time with so many things on the to-do list.
There is one thing above all that is came to mind while thinking about this question of challenges: the amount of time that we spend every year, learning new methods of growing vegetables and farming with no-till. Learning the hard way, getting better and more efficient, as we learn from our successes and mistakes.
What if these weren’t new ventures? What if this sort of thing was simply established as common knowledge?
Today, farming is industrialized. It is highly mechanical. It is dependent on a wide array of synthetic chemicals and absurdly expensive equipment. Challenges in this sort of farming today is about advances in technology, genetic modification, precision applicators, or slow-release fertilizers.
After a long enough time, these sorts of methods become so normalized that it is difficult to imagine any other way of doing things.
Where would we be today if farmers were instead handed down information about plants and soil biology, about how nature functions, about the carbon cycle, if the tools and methods we learned to use were designed to assist nature and work with nature’s principles?
There is a great lack of institutional and generational knowledge in any method of farming that isn’t an industrial method. This isn’t to say there is no information available – there certainly is – but it is a different thing entirely to come into sets of information and experiences by both those who came before you and the community surrounding you.
A common knowledge set of how the symphony of nature works together to do incredible things, available as generational knowledge and institutional knowledge held by the community writ large, would be an absolute game-changer. It would effect how we approach everything from the design of cities to the methods of agriculture.
The real challenge then, is to do the difficult, consistent work of building that knowledge, one generation at a time.
Graham -
What are we doing to our soil?
Humans have spent eons changing the landscape, clearing forests, draining wetlands, and ploughing grasslands to grow food. And we are still doing this, in sensitive and ever-disappearing ecosystems.
With the advent of what I’m going to refer to as “chemical farming” (synthetic fertilizers, herbicides and pesticides) which began in the early 20th century, agriculture entered a period of industrialization, and crops became commodities. The goal, as with all extractive industries, is to always get more. In this case, the more being sought is higher yield.
The resource that makes this at all possible – soil – is not some sort of blank canvas medium that you can add ever-increasing amounts of various chemical substances to, isn’t how soil works. Of course you can make soil work this way, if you keep applying more chemicals.
As with all actions, there are consequences.
Soil degradation is a massive problem. The numbers are staggering. The UN has flagged 1this as a major issue, affecting agricultural output, food security, local economies, global economies, and commodity markets. A lot of this has to do with our land use practices – such as cultivation and so on – but the solution to decreasing crop yield, and the loss of the resource in which you need to grow it? More chemicals.
The chemical industry and industrial farming industry claim that these chemical products are “feeding the world,” but ignore consequences. The practices of cultivating and fertilizing and spraying chemicals to millions of hectares of single-species crops (modified to not be damaged by the chemicals we invent) leads to is nothing short of a global catastrophe of environmental and land use malpractice. Big business, big omissions.
So where does this end? Clearly these are not sustainable trends. The amount of applied chemical fertilizers keeps increasing, along with the chemicals needed to maintain these monolithic monocultures. All of a sudden, in the span of a mere ~100 years, humans have dumped enormous amounts of invented chemicals as a solution to solve invented problems all over the world. It’s an astounding make-work project for something nature has figured out a long while ago.
There is clearly some fundamental misunderstanding of what soil is, and what it can do, or how plants grow, if we collectively believe that more chemicals are the answer to the degrading resource we grow them in. The same chemical industry that is intimately linked with the fossil carbon industry, perhaps isn’t the best route to understanding…biology.
One need only go for a walk in a forest to understand that chemicals are not necessary for sustaining life on this planet. What is in the forest soil that is not in our agricultural soil? Where is the forest magically getting nitrogen from, if not provided by a chemical company? Or grasslands, for that matter? How was the world green at all, before the invention of chemical fertilizers, approximately 100 years ago? How did plants even manage to evolve, one could wonder, without ever-increasing dividends to shareholders?
Life on this planet has been cycling nutrients and sequestering carbon and evolving in the most beautifully designed way for a very long time. The ecological processes which intertwine and drive the production of energy to on is nothing short of astounding….and it is human arrogance that arrives at a conclusion to simplify what plants do to just “NPK.”
The development and maintenance of these industries at the expense of the resource of our soil is not only unsustainable, it threatens our civilization. Soil is responsible for life as we know it.
Until we learn to see and understand the very resources that keep us alive as something to view through the lens of a living system instead of short-term extraction systems and always-increasing-profits, we risk a great deal…not just the health of ourselves and our communities, but the health of our global ecosystem, and our planet.
Maybe we can start by asking different kinds of questions. Why are we allowing it to blow away and wash away? Why do we need more chemicals, with new application technologies? What are we doing to feed and nurture soil, as a biological system?
Graham
thanks for reading
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Grandpa’s Smoked Yellow Tea
I didn’t know anything about tea. Until last week.
During a walk I was captivated by a little teahouse I passed by and decided to stop in and look, even though I wouldn’t call myself a tea drinker. It is a very small place…only several tables, and it was full. While browsing their little shop, a table happened to open up and the owner asked if I wanted to stay, so…why not take a little rest in a charming little teahouse?
Not knowing what to order, I sort of picked one more or less at random. It arrived a few minutes later on a little tray, already perfectly brewed. Lifting the lid of the little brewing pot, I was greeted by a billowing aroma, and struck by the enormous size of beautiful, delicious tea leaves.
It was the best tea I had ever had.
The owner and tea master was kind and generous with the knowledge she had. I would later learn I was served tea in the method of a Gongfu tea ceremony, and the little brewing pot was known as a Gaiwan. Tea leaves, treated with respect, brewed carefully. And so, to make a longer story a bit shorter…
I finally learned about tea. And I would learn more, because when I got home, I of course researched more tea-related things. Mostly about the tea leaf itself. Did I know all teas, green, black, yellow, white, all came from the same plant, and that a wide majority of all the tea ever grown comes from a single species Camellia sinensis? I did not! Did I know that some bag of tea at the grocery store that you dunk it in hot water is filled with the dusty remnants of the tea manufacturing process? I did not!
How would I know? How would anyone know, if they were staring at a wall of teas at a supermarket, all colourfully graphically designed and brand-stamped to give you a feeling that you are buying something fresh, revitalizing or good for your health?
This is not a story about tea, or what good tea is, or what bad tea is, but about how disconnected and disempowered we are as consumers.As we become more and more and more removed from the source of what we are purchasing as consumers, we are less and less and even less empowered with knowledge.
Over the coming weeks I hope to explore the different ways our extractive economy impacts our communities. Perhaps when we think of extraction we think of fossil carbon, or a mining company. But all aspects in our modern society are built around the concept of extraction, including the extraction of the knowledge base from the very communities we live in.
The day after my teahouse experience, I tried replicating the brewing process, as the tea master shared with me. I brewed the right temperature of water, and watched the pieces of tea leaf swell, unfolding into their enormous and beautiful shapes, filling the air with aromas that reminds of a summer cabin. After brewing and removing the leaves from the teapot, it is immediately evident that these leaves are not finished, they seem full of life, still. Indeed, I will use these leaves for a 2nd, perhaps 3rd, maybe even a 4th time, before they have been all brewed out…a far cry from a bag full of bitter dust designed to be thrown away.
Sustainability requires that we nurture something in such a way that it never enters a depleted state. To achieve that, we need to know the rest of the story, all of the steps, from beginning, to end. Knowledge, is empowering.
Graham
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Hello, World
Would like to begin this project by stating some goals and aspirations, a sort of mission statement.
Every Wednesday, starting today, one short post will be published. I hope to share some knowledge I have, or observations I make via my work, to shine a light on different aspects of the agricultural industry from an ecological or community point of view. I hope to explore alternative value systems and place an emphasis on the natural framework in which we live.
The current state of the world and what humans have done with the gift we have been given is alarming. I am astonished at the hubris of humanity to dominate and destroy our environment for perceived gains. As a student of Nature, I hope to share the historical, contextual and scientific reasons for choosing a different path…to inspire Nature.
My intention is to build a long-lasting community where we can share knowledge and ideas and change the culture around what we consider normal.
Subscribe (in the sidebar or footer below) to get a new post in your inbox every Wednesday.
Welcome to Complimentary Blueberry Juice.
Thanks for reading.Graham
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About Graham
Graham is an ecologist-farmer from Canada working on educating about the wonders and beauty of the natural world, and how we can design biodiverse food production systems.
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