In chapter 4 I wrote, “We are called to visit deep questions like ‘What are we here for?’ ‘What is humanity’s right role on earth?’ ‘What does the earth want?’” I wrote, “In the new relationship…, whenever we take from the earth, we seek to do so in a way that enriches the earth. We aren’t unconscious of our impact, nor do we seek to minimize our impact. We seek to make a beautiful impact that serves all life.”
This is the sponsoring precept of a growing movement that has adopted the adjective “regenerative” to describe its practices. The best known is regenerative agriculture.
Regenerative agriculture comprises an array of techniques that rebuild soil, water, and biodiversity. Typically, it uses cover crops and perennials so that bare soil is never exposed, fosters synergistic relationships among multiple food and nonfood crops, restores the natural water cycle, and grazes animals in ways that mimic herd animals in nature. In focusing on soil, it carries the original spirit of organic agriculture. The term “organic” was adopted by its preceptor, J. I. Rodale, in reference to the organic (carbon-containing) molecules that form living soil. He understood that soil is more than a mixture of chemicals. Unfortunately, the term has lost that original meaning, perverted to the point now where the USDA allows organic labeling on hydroponic vegetables that are grown in no soil at all. That is why I am not using the term “organic agriculture” here, although the regenerative practices I will describe are indeed organic in the true spirit of Rodale.
Regenerative practices have received attention recently for their ability to quickly sequester large amounts of carbon. As the reader knows by now, I think it is a mistake to evaluate technologies based on a single quantity like carbon, but in this case carbon corresponds to the building of topsoil. Topsoil is the foundation of life on land; it is the living layer of Earth’s surface. Regenerative farmers and permaculture farmers understand that all beings on a farm, including human beings, will thrive when the soil thrives.
One promising technique to rebuild soil health is called management-intensive rotational grazing (MIRG), which seeks to raise animals in a way that mimics their role on natural grasslands. Unless you come from a culture that still practices traditional nomadic animal husbandry, when you think of pastured animals you probably picture an expanse of grass dotted with cows or sheep. That picture is far from anything you would see in a healthy ecosystem. Healthy ecosystems include predators for whom a field of scattered sheep would amount to an all-you-can-eat buffet. That is why herbivores gather in large herds for protection, intensively grazing an area and then moving on. That is what MIRG replicates.
As in natural grasslands, large concentrated herds of herbivores maintain grassland health and build soil. The herd eats mostly the sweet grass tops and tramples down and manures the rest of the plants before they can eat them down to the roots. This allows the grass to quickly recover after the herd moves on. Not only is the soil protected from erosion by the thick layer of trampled vegetation, but the damage causes the plants to send sugars into the roots, generating the rich exudates that, along with the manure and decaying plant matter, nourish soil biota. The soil biota, especially earthworms, increases the permeability of the soil, making it into a sponge for rain. The hooves of the animals aid that process by piercing the soil surface and making indentations that trap water.
When practiced on degraded land, MIRG brings it back to life. Dried-up springs begin flowing again, brown landscapes turn green, birds and biodiverse wildlife return, seasonal streams start flowing year-round, and depleted soils recover tilth and depth.
The most influential practitioner of management-intensive rotational grazing is Allan Savory, a Zimbabwean biologist and farmer who has inspired and taught his methods to farmers throughout sub-Saharan Africa, North America, South America, and Australia. His TED talk shows stunning before-and-after photos of land restored through the practice, which he calls Holistic Grazing.1
His claims have engendered considerable controversy.2 I tend to believe the pro side: first, because the critics attack an uninformed caricature of the practices Savory promotes; second, because there has been a veritable groundswell of farmers and ranchers using the method and sharing anecdotes throughout the alternative farming media. However, actual proof is hard to obtain, in large part because of a paucity of hard quantitative data. In addition to the difficulty in measuring soil carbon, MIRG is not a standardized process, but must vary according to local conditions, even from one farm or valley to the next. That is the point in Savory’s use of the term “holistic.” The right practices can be determined only in intimate relationship to the land.
Although carbon sequestration data for MIRG practices is scarce, recent studies point to amounts that are much greater than most scientists previously believed. A 2014 study at the University of Georgia measured annual per-hectare increases in soil carbon at 8 tons per year on farms converted from row cropping to intensively managed grazing.3 Water retention also rose by a third. The world uses about 3.5 billion hectares of land for pasture and fodder crops. Converting just a tenth of that land to MIRG practices would (using the 8 tons figure above) sequester a quarter of present emissions. (MIRG also reduces methane emissions by as much as 22 percent compared to conventional meat production.)4
Individual farmers report much higher carbon sequestration figures. One of the most famous regenerative farms is Brown’s Ranch in North Dakota, which used holistic grazing practices to raise carbon levels from 4 percent to 10 percent in the span of six years—equivalent to 20 tons of carbon per hectare per year.5 Its rainwater absorption capacity also rose from a half inch an hour—entailing massive runoff—to eight inches per hour.6 The rancher/farmer Gabe Brown and his family do not rely on managed grazing alone. They use a complex mix of cover crops, and multilayered intercropping as well: picture radishes and turnips growing under a canopy of sunflowers. They deliberately cultivate plants with a variety of root depths. The diverse, perennial vegetation nourishes high insect biodiversity, providing natural pest control—the farm has no problems with the corn root worm that plagues neighboring farms and is America’s number one agricultural pest. Despite using no pesticides and no fertilizers, the farm yields 25 percent more corn than the county average, at a much lower cost per bushel.
Like grazing, regenerative horticulture also bears tremendous promise to draw down carbon, using similar principles. It avoids plowing or any other form of soil disturbance, favoring cover crops that are crimped or cut to feed soil biota and become the next layer of humus. According to research at the Rodale Institute, if instituted universally, organic regenerative techniques practiced on cultivated land could offset over 40 percent of global emissions, while practicing them on pastureland could offset 71 percent.7 The potential for land-based CO2 reduction is over 100 percent of current emissions—and that doesn’t even include reforestation and afforestation.
Another impressive approach is Syntropic Agriculture, also known as regenerative analog forestry, developed in Brazil by Ernst Gotsch. In 1984 he purchased a huge 500-hectare farm that had been severely degraded due to clear-cutting, a manioc plantation on hillsides, and other abuse. It was known locally as “the dry land.” Gotsch restored the land to health by mimicking ecological succession, by applying companion planting, and through heavy “chop-and-drop” pruning to build soil organic matter. Thirty years later, the land has been transformed. Fourteen dry springs have come back to life, streams flow all year round, the biodiversity of the original Atlantic coastal rainforest has returned, temperatures have cooled in the micro-region, and rainfall has increased. And the farm produces abundant food, lumber, and other products, including what some consider the world’s highest quality cacao beans,8 all without irrigation, pesticides, or fertilizers of any kind. As one worker there explains, food production rides on top of natural forest succession instead of fighting it. With each successive harvest, the soil is richer than the year before.9 Projects inspired by his model have taken off throughout Brazil, and have spread to Australia and other places as well.
Gotsch did not develop this method with the goal of drawing down carbon, but according to a study by Cooperafloresta Brazil, his method sequesters about 10 tons/hectare of carbon depending on where it is in the successional cycle.10 I mention this mainly to reiterate that the ecosystems-centered view of this book does not contradict the requirements of the standard climate narrative. Nor, however, does it depend on that narrative for its motivation—in the water frame and the biodiversity frame, regenerative practices are even more appealing.
Whether from the carbon frame, the water frame, or the biodiversity frame, regenerative agriculture makes ecological sense. It also makes sense from the point of view of food productivity. Why then, despite rising popularity, does it remain so marginal—agriculturally as well as scientifically?
The reason has to do with its incompatibility with ingrained ways of thinking, economic institutions, and scientific practices.
Farms such as Brown’s and Gotsch’s use a dynamic combination of many regenerative practices that are sensitive to unique and ever-changing local conditions. This makes it very difficult to isolate and quantify the effects of any single practice. A scientific demonstration of any of those practices would entail holding other variables constant across multiple test fields and control fields. This is not how regenerative agriculture works. One cannot apply standard processes to multiple parcels of land, because each place is unique. Therefore regenerative practices do not fit easily into current scientific protocol.11 Furthermore, the pesticide, fertilizer, and genetically modified seed companies that fund most agricultural research have little incentive to fund studies of practices that require none of the above. Therefore, the data on the carbon sequestration, water retention, biodiversity benefits, and so on for regenerative agriculture remains mostly anecdotal.
The lack of hard data, in turn, prevents regenerative agriculture from entering a data-driven policy discourse. When environmental policy is based on quantitative greenhouse gas targets, how does one promote practices that do not easily generate quantifiable results? Compared to fossil fuel emissions, underground biotic carbon storage is hard to measure even when we attempt it. Harder still to quantify would be the indirect benefits of biodiversity, groundwater recharge, and so forth.
It is not that policymakers find Gotsch’s achievements unimpressive (his short film was shown at COP21). It is that they are hard to translate into current data-based policy. Ultimately we are being invited into a different way of engaging the world. Only dead things can be reduced to a set of data. A civilization that sees the world as alive will learn to bring other kinds of information into its choices.
Regenerative agriculture represents more than a shift of practices. It is also a shift in paradigm and in our basic relationship to nature.
Regenerative agriculture seeks to mimic and participate in nature, not dominate it. In the holistic view of regenerative agriculture, problems like low fertility, runoff, weeds, and pests are understood as symptoms of a disharmony between the farmer and the land. Instead of going to war against the problems, the farmer seeks to adjust her practices to restore soil health, water health, species distribution, and so on, in a process of deepening relationship.
In many respects, regenerative practices like organic no-till horticulture and management-intensive grazing fit poorly into the present agricultural-industrial complex, which favors standard products via standard processes with standard inputs at a predictable cost. Regenerative practices require intimate knowledge of the micro-conditions of each place. What works in Austria may not work in Cameroon, or even in the next valley over. What worked last year may not work this year.
There is no formula that says how long a herd should stay in each paddock for maximum soil regeneration. The farmer has to observe conditions and consider them in light of past learning, his own and possibly that of his father, his grandfather, his neighbors … learning through trial and error and adding to the knowledge base. Likewise, there is no formula that says how deep to dig a swale and what to plant in it for best water retention. There is no formula for which cover crop mix is best. All of these are context-dependent. That means a farmer can never be a mere laborer.
For a regenerative agriculture system to work, farmers need to relate to land as to a unique individual. They must learn to listen to, see, and feel its needs and moods. Allan Savory goes without shoes to pick up subliminal information about the land he walks. The knowledge of a place builds over a lifetime and over generations, becoming embedded in a local culture. This kind of relationship is totally different from that of industrial agriculture, which treats parcels of land as just so many standard units, describable in terms of quantities of nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium, rainfall, pH, and so forth. Regenerative agriculture rejects the industrial model of production, with its pursuit of standardization and scale.
A food system that starts with intimate relationship to land will occupy a different place in society from the current system. For one thing, it requires a lot more time, and therefore a much larger segment of the population to practice farming and gardening.
At present, less than 1 percent of the population of the United States makes their living farming, down from two-thirds in 1850, half in 1880, and 10 percent as recently as 1955. Even in absolute terms, the farm population has fallen by 90 percent from its peak of about 32 million in 1910.12 Other countries have showed a similar trend. Demographers and climate thinkers usually take its continuation for granted: one frequently reads statements like “By 2050, 70 percent of the world’s population will live in cities.”
This is a trend that must change if we are to live in right relationship to Earth. Urbanization is not some law of nature, nor an inevitable stage of human progress. Economic and technological conditions, among them the mechanization of agriculture and its conversion into commodity production, drive urbanization. Urbanization is uprooting; it is disconnection from the places of multigenerational cultural embedment; it is a distancing from the land. Yes, there is a role for cities; the archetype of the city will not and should not disappear from earth. Cities can be beautiful cauldrons of cultural ferment, alchemic crucibles that yield products only possible in an intense concentration of humanity. Yet for many, the land is calling; in fact, the trend toward urbanization is already showing signs of reversing in some developed countries. According to the 2014 USDA census, the number of young farmers began growing in 2007, reversing a longtime trend.
An objection to the call for more people involved in farming goes like this: “That’s easy for you to say, because you are a privileged professional who doesn’t know how hard and laborious farm work is.” This objection fails on several fronts, not the least of which is that I do spend a lot of time doing manual labor on my brother’s farm. Farm work in the context of industrial agriculture is very different from farm work on small, diverse, ecological farms. On the latter, tasks are diverse as well; rarely does one spend hour after hour, day after day, picking beans or driving a tractor back and forth. On the industrial farm, work is much like any industrial work: repetitive, routine, and dehumanizing. No wonder its final stage is its literal dehumanization, in the sense of replacing people with machines. The techno-utopian dream of transcending labor seems quite attractive if we take for granted what labor became with the rise of technology.
In the Story of Ascent, a move back to the land would be a regression. We were supposed to be progressing away from labor, away from materiality, away from the dirt. In that story, heavenly was better than earthly, high better than low, clean better than dirty, the mind better than the body, and the highest social classes the ones furthest removed from the land. Today’s new computerized robotic hydroponic vegetable factories are its inevitable outgrowth. You can see how big a change it is to revere the farm again, and to reunite with the long-distanced material world.
Projections of growing urbanization take for granted the very thing that must change.
I hope the above descriptions of regenerative farms put to rest the notion that industrial agriculture is needed to feed a hungry planet. Not only is it unsustainable long term, but it doesn’t even outperform ecological agriculture in the short term. Again, quantitative proof of this claim is hard to come by. Most regenerative farms have no need to maximize food productivity per acre.
Some readers might protest that scientific studies typically show organic crop yields to be lower than conventional yields. Here we must look at what these studies take for granted. The high yields of small mixed farms are hard to measure because they typically produce multiple crops that may not find their way to commodity markets, but instead are consumed locally, via farm share programs or farmers markets, sometimes outside the money economy. Moreover, traditional forms of agriculture often employ multicropping and intercropping. So while an organic corn field will underperform a GMO corn field, what about the total yield of a corn field that also grows beans and squash, and is patrolled by free ranging chickens who eat the bugs? What about when insect-damaged fruit or vegetable seconds feed pigs or other livestock?
Optimal results come from long, even multigenerational, experience applied in intimate relationship to each farm. Comparisons of organic and conventional agriculture often use organic farms recently converted from conventional practices; rarely do they consider the most highly evolved farms where soil, knowledge, and practices have been rebuilt over decades.
I asked my brother, an organic vegetable farmer on 120 acres of land, what it would take for him to maximize food production in an ecologically sustainable way. (At present, he farms only about a tenth of that land.) In his typical laconic manner, he replied, “About two hundred people.” If he converted the woodlands (severely degraded by 150 years of repeated logging) to agroforestry; if he put in water retention ponds and raised fish there; if he converted cultivated land to perennials and no-till intercropping; if he applied mob grazing to the pastureland; if he had a composting biogas operation to generate heat and electricity … he could grow twenty times more food than he does today. But he doesn’t have the two hundred people necessary to implement all these things; he has, depending on the season, between one and ten. So, his operation is based on generating a high output per unit of labor, not per unit of land.
This might explain why, around the world, small farms far outperform large farms in terms of yield. First observed by Nobel economist Amartya Sen in 1962, it has been confirmed by numerous studies in many countries. The best-known recent study looked at small farms in Turkey, which still has a strong base of traditional peasant agriculture.13 Small farms there outproduced large farms by a factor of 20, despite (or because of?) their slower adoption of modern methods. Yet, the narrative of modern agriculture feeding the world is so strong that the OECD stated that “stopping land fragmentation” in Turkey “and consolidating the highly fragmented land is indispensable for raising agricultural productivity.”14
Of course, small farms can be ecologically destructive just as large farms can, but in general, the worst abuses happen at industrial scale. Small farmers are much better able to put intensive care into their land, read its signs, and respond flexibly.
Figuratively and literally, we need to go back to the land. Unfortunately, U.S. policy has encouraged the opposite, aggressively pushing the interests of large agribusinesses around the globe. Thankfully, many countries, localities, and farmers have resisted this push. Most notably, France, Germany, Venezuela, and Russia have banned cultivation of genetically modified crops; Russia has banned their importation as well, as part of a nationwide transition to organic agriculture. This is about more than GMOs; it is about a whole model of industrial agriculture that goes along with it.
Is it practical to transition to a radically different model of agriculture in time to avert ecological catastrophe? My colleague Marie Goodwin attended a meeting of the Delaware Valley Regional Planning Commission about food security and arable land in the Philadelphia metropolitan region. The presiding official’s presentation showed that the amount of farmland in the region was far less than that required to feed so many people should there be a breakdown in the global food system. Marie pointed out that if you included lawns, there would be enough land to feed everyone. The official was dismissive. “That’s impossible,” she said. “We could never get people to grow enough food at home to make any difference.”
Marie points out that in the U.S. during the Second World War, victory gardens were responsible for 40 percent of all vegetables grown during that period: 9–10 million tons. It was an even greater percentage in Britain. This just goes to show how our notions of what is possible or realistic depend on cultural perceptions. Cultural perceptions can change, must change, and are changing. If by realistic we mean keeping everything the same, then we are going to have to stop being so “realistic.”
Given the ruinous course we are on today, a more accurate word for “realistic” is actually “fatalistic.” Again I’ll quote Eileen Crist:
In fatalistic thinking, the trajectory of industrial-consumer civilization appears set on tracks that humanity cannot desert without derailing; it is implied that while the specifics of the future may elude us, in broad outline it is (for better or for worse) a fixed direction of more of the same. Fatalism projects the course of human history (and concomitantly of natural history) as the inevitable unfolding of the momentum of present trends. By virtue of the inertia that massive forces display, from a fatalistic viewpoint, present patterns of global economic expansion, consumption increase, population growth, conversion and exploitation of the land, killing of wildlife, extinction of species, chemical contamination, depletion of oceans, and so on, will more or less keep unfolding.15
For there to be meaningful healing on this planet, “impossibilities” like more people growing food cannot remain impossible. We are indeed talking about a wholesale civilizational transformation.
Yes, it would require spending more time per capita on food production to feed ourselves and heal the land at the same time. It might require widespread home gardens, and government policies to encourage them. It might require 10 percent or 20 percent of the population to be involved in agriculture, not 1 percent. In a time of increasing global unemployment, this should not be a problem.
A model for a way forward might be found in Russia. In 2003, Russia promulgated the Private Garden Plot Act, which entitled every citizen to a tax-free private plot of several acres of land for gardening or recreation and accelerated the dacha and ecovillage movement there. As of 2016, small plots provided nearly half of Russia’s food.16 In many developed countries, though, agricultural regulations, zoning laws, building codes, and so on make it difficult if not illegal to farm ecologically, especially for the small farmer. In America, for example, concerns about food safety have led to prohibitions on mixing livestock and crops. No more ducks eating slugs or chickens controlling insects. No more dogs protecting fields from woodchucks and deer. Complicated regulations that were created to rein in large producers’ irresponsible behavior can be prohibitively time-consuming and expensive for the small farmer, who does not have a compliance department to manage the paperwork. The regulations were created for, and to a large extent by, large producers. Newly proposed regulations require documentation of each time livestock is moved. This is no problem for a confinement operation with thousands of hogs or chickens that are occasionally moved en masse. It is impossible for a small ecological farm to comply, when it may have a few dozen head of livestock and a small flock of poultry that is constantly moving.
Outside agriculture, other regulations are misaligned with ecological needs. Tiny homes do not meet building code size requirements. Homes using composting toilets and graywater aquaponics systems nonetheless have to install expensive and unnecessary septic systems.
To align our society with ecological healing is not impractical. It just needs a shift in our perceptions, priorities, and laws. Nature’s tendency is toward wholeness, if we only align ourselves with it instead of fighting to keep things the same.
On the level of national and global policy, a transition to regenerative agriculture would require significant political will and leadership. Many farmers today are stretched to the limit by their debt obligations, making it impossible to afford a few years of lower income while transitioning their farm. Some kind of public subsidy is needed to support the transition. I think the best way to accomplish this would be to reassign existing subsidies (agriculture is already highly subsidized in many countries). In the U.S., some 85 percent of farm subsidies go to the largest 15 percent of farm operations.17 Annual farm subsidies are at least $20 billion in the U.S. and even more in the EU. Using just half that, one hundred thousand American small farms a year could each receive a $100,000 three-year transition subsidy. That is a slow enough pace to avoid disruptions in the food supply, and fast enough to make a significant ecological difference. I will be happy to donate the dinner napkin on which I made these calculations to Congress.
Then there is the labor problem—except that there isn’t one. Here again we can simply redirect existing resources. Youth unemployment is at least 10 percent in the U.S. and nearly 20 percent in Europe. Moreover, governments around the world, especially the U.S., spend vast sums to induce young people to join the military, or even require them to do so. Among the American working class and underclass, many choose military service because of an idealistic desire to serve, coupled with a lack of economic opportunity in any other field except illegal drugs. Unfortunately, this idealism depends on obsolescing narratives such as “America, bringing liberty and democracy to the world” that are actually cover stories for imperialism. As the age of empire dwindles, these narratives are losing their power, yielding to a creeping cynicism within the military, and especially among veterans. If I may make an immodest proposal, what if we met these twin needs of service to the world and economic security by creating an eco-corps, dedicated to ecological healing and to the service of all life on earth?
Ecological healing works in both directions: working with plants, animals, soil, and water has powerful therapeutic benefits.18 Modalities like horticulture therapy and garden therapy show impressive results for at-risk youth, prisoners, veterans, and people with chronic diseases, not surprising when we understand health as wholeness, and disconnection as disease. Psychiatric conditions in particular improve with interaction with nature, lending credence to the view that most of them are symptoms of “nature deficit disorder.” Conditions like ADHD, depression, and anxiety often improve or disappear entirely when the individual interacts regularly and meaningfully with the natural world. The healing of individuals, society, and the world go hand in hand.
In the carbon-centric climate narrative, ecological healing efforts that do not directly sequester carbon receive little attention. That must change if, as I have argued, water is as important or more important than carbon in maintaining climate equilibrium.
To be sure, all of the regenerative agriculture practices I’ve described bear huge benefits for the water cycle. In contrast to Brown’s Ranch with its eight-inch-per-hour absorptive capacity, on conventionally farmed land most of the water from heavy rains either runs off (carrying topsoil with it) or forms puddles on the ground that quickly evaporate. Then the water never recharges the aquifers.
As a general rule, what is good for the soil is good for the water. Hydrological health is a happy side effect of soil health.
There are also practices designed with the explicit purpose of restoring water health, for which building soil may be the happy side effect. These practices are especially significant in desertifying areas, where they are stopping and even reversing the process of desertification.
India is among the countries most vulnerable to water scarcity. Heavy use of groundwater for irrigation has led to plummeting water tables and dried-up wells. The solution, typically, is to dig deeper wells—a patently myopic response. But in Rajasthan, Rajendra Singh, known popularly as the “waterman of India,” has inspired a movement to implement low-tech water retention structures, reviving a technology thousands of years old. These structures include johads, which store water for future use in a way that also allows it to slowly permeate into the ground, earthen dams to create small reservoirs, and check dams to slow runoff after heavy rains and allow greater penetration into the water table. His work ignites a “virtuous circle”: greater water availability leading to more vegetation, leading to less soil erosion, leading to more water penetration, leading to more groundwater availability. Farming also becomes more productive, so that like the soil, the rural population no longer runs off to the cities. More local labor means more capacity to maintain the johads and dams. Singh’s ideas have been implemented in over a thousand villages, which maintain thousands of water retention projects and have planted millions of trees. Five dormant rivers in the region have come back to life and flow year-round.19
A related concept to Singh’s work is the “water retention landscape,” which uses terraces, berms, swales, and ponds to catch water during the rainy season so that it soaks into the water table instead of running off. My first encounter with water retention landscapes was at the Tamera Ecovillage in southern Portugal, a desertifying region where streams that once flowed year-round now flow only seasonally. Arriving at Tamera after several hours of driving through dusty, brown landscapes, I was stunned by an explosion of green. Fruit trees, gardens, and forests surrounded several ponds and small lakes—this in the middle of a drought-stricken summer. My first suspicion was that they had been pumping out groundwater. No, it had accumulated from last winter’s rains, held in the lakes by earthen dams. My second suspicion was that this community (whose majority are German expatriates) had arrogantly engineered and dominated the landscape. “How did you decide where to put the lakes?” I asked. They replied that they closely observed the land for several years until they understood where the water wanted to be. This attitude exemplifies the intimate relationship with the natural world that must come prior to any system of methods or practices.
Water retention slows the process of rain returning to the sea, so that it completes what the brilliant and controversial Austrian scientist Viktor Schauberger called the “full water cycle.” In the half water cycle, water evaporates from the ocean, falls as rain over land, and flows into streams and eventually back to the ocean. In the full cycle, the rain sinks into the earth and spends anywhere from weeks to decades there before emerging from springs. Working in the early twentieth century, Schauberger was an early critic of deforestation, which he recognized as a culprit in truncating the full water cycle.
Water retention can be accomplished in urban areas as well, through permeable surfaces, tree planting, catchment basins, and household rainwater storage cisterns. Without such measures, cities can do tremendous damage to surrounding communities and ecosystems. Los Angeles sparked the infamous Water Wars of Southern California in 1913 when it began diverting the Sierra Nevada snowmelt, and continues to dominate the region’s water resources, spending a billion dollars a year to source water. Meanwhile, the city also spends half a billion dollars getting rid of water—through its stormwater system. Like many places, LA has both too much water and too little water, flood and drought. One naturally follows the other: floods and droughts are both consequences of low rainfall absorption. Water retention, also called “slow water,” can ameliorate both, turning both deserts and cities green again.
What is possible on ranches and cities is also possible on a gigantic scale. One of the most impressive desertification reversal projects is the Loess Plateau Watershed Rehabilitation Project in northern China, made famous by filmmaker John D. Liu. The loess plateau of this region was a cradle of civilization, exceeded only by Mesopotamia in its antiquity, and suffering a similar fate. According to Liu, by the year 1000 deforestation and unsustainable agricultural practices had reduced a lush land of forests and grasslands to a parched, eroded wasteland that looks like a desert even though it receives modest rainfall. That is because 95 percent of it runs off immediately, forming huge erosion gullies and giving the Yellow River its characteristic color.
The results of the rehabilitation project can be seen in Liu’s stunning before-and-after photographs—the land has literally come back to life. The change came through a huge investment of labor, money, and planning. Local residents were recruited in large numbers to build small earthen dams, terraces, and other water retention features. They planted trees, abandoned slopelands unsuitable for planting, and restricted the grazing of sheep and goats. Crucially, they closely participated in the planning of the project as well, and were given subsidies for their labor and granted land rights to restored areas. In the end, an area of 15,600 square kilometers (the size of Belgium) was restored at a cost of about half a billion dollars. The written word cannot do justice to the changes that transformed the landscape, but Liu’s film has inspired similar projects in Rwanda, Ethiopia, Jordan, and other countries.
These projects show what is possible when the collective human will is brought into alignment with Earth’s capacity to heal. It shows what is possible when we make a collective choice toward beauty rather than quantity. And here is the caveat—it does require will, an active choice. Otherwise, we will continue to slide in the direction of our inertia.
Is something like this possible globally? Is it practical? Realistic? No, if we accept the permanence of society as we know it. Yes, if we are prepared to let go of what had seemed unchangeable. A half billion dollars over ten years is nothing in comparison with, say, global military budgets, which total about 3,300 times that. Devoting just 10 percent of military spending to watershed restoration would fund 330 loess-sized projects. Earth is actually not asking very much of us.
All right, I admit it, that last sentence is a bit disingenuous. Earth is asking a lot of us. Earth is demanding a transformation of our civilization’s fundamental priorities. Earth is demanding that we see her as sacred. Earth is demanding that we see her as alive. Earth is demanding we reorder our civilization and all its institutions accordingly. Money, government, law, technology … all must change. That is why the ecological crisis is truly an initiation for humanity.
When I speak publicly about the planetary crisis, often someone in the audience will tell me, in remonstrative tones, that it isn’t a planetary crisis at all. The planet will be just fine regardless of what we humans do. The threat isn’t to Gaia; it is to humanity.
This well-worn assertion appears to embody humility with respect to the vast power of nature; in fact, it represents a subtle form of human exceptionalism and a disregard for nature’s purposiveness. If we affirm that Gaia is a living being with a life cycle and a destiny, then we can only assume that humanity was born for an evolutionary purpose. Each species, each child of Gaia, has a role to play, and we are no exception. The fulfillment of that role is thus of crucial planetary importance.
Imagine saying of a mother with a gravely ill child, “The threat isn’t to the mother or the family; it is to the child. Don’t worry about the mother. If the child dies she’ll be fine.” Only if we understand life as a happenstantial film of biochemistry on an orbiting rock, can we ignore the intuition that humanity was entrusted with gifts and bound by love to serve the evolution of planet Earth. Only by denying that Gaia is a coherent, conscious, purposive being can we imagine that humanity’s survival does not matter.
Nature does not produce a new species by accident. Ten or twenty years ago, this statement would have seemed blatantly unscientific, contradicting as it does the principle that evolution happens only through random mutation followed by natural selection; but today the study of epigenetics and biological genetic engineering makes it clear that genes, organisms, and the environment evolve together in a tightly coupled nonlinear partnership. Evolution is purposeful.20 No, I am not advocating Intelligent Design, unless it is the intelligence inherent in nature itself. Nature itself has purpose—it doesn’t need a divinity to impose it from the outside. That God, made in the image of the human engineer, is retiring. The new God doesn’t impose intelligence onto a lifeless mechanism of a universe. The new God is the intelligence of a living, sacred universe. The purpose that guides the evolution of species comes from larger, living wholes. The environment creates organisms for its purposes, as much as organisms alter the environment for theirs. The parts create the whole, and the whole creates the parts.
The Whole has created humans too for its purpose.
There is a certain comfort in thinking that the planet will be fine without us, yet there is also a certain fatalism. It is akin to the fatalism that comes in response to disconnection from one’s destiny. It induces a kind of aimlessness. As humanity exits the old Story of Ascent and its triumphant techno-utopian destiny, we are indeed experiencing a collective aimlessness. In that story, our purpose was ourselves. That purpose has been exhausted. We are ready to devote ourselves to something greater.
In the Story of Interbeing, entrusted with gifts and bound by love, we realize that our passage through the present initiatory crisis is of planetary moment. Out of the wreckage of what we thought we knew, something else may be born.
The regenerative practices I’ve described are rooted in a mindset and way of relating that goes back tens of thousands of years outside civilization, and even as a recessive gene within civilization, the seed of the future.
This section is named after a book by Kat Anderson that describes the relationship between the pre-colonial indigenous people of California and the land. Anderson demolishes the myth that hunter-gatherer people were mere occupants of pristine “nature,” demonstrating their deliberate, sustained influence on the composition of biotopes and species in their territory. Entire landscapes that appeared to the untrained eye of white settlers as wild were anything but. Anderson explains:
Through coppicing, pruning, harrowing, sowing, weeding, burning, digging, thinning, and selective harvesting, they encouraged desired characteristics of individual plants, increased populations of useful plants, and altered the structures and compositions of plant communities. Regular burning of many types of vegetation across the state created better habitat for game, eliminated brush, minimized potential for catastrophic fires, and encouraged diversity of food crops. These harvest and management practices, on the whole, allowed for sustainable harvest of plants over centuries and possibly thousands of years.21
When white settlers marveled at the stupendous bounty of fish, game, and wild plant foods that the Indians, it seemed, lazily lived off in an indolent existence, when John Muir wrote his glorious praise of California’s Central Valley with its endless meadows of wildflowers, they were actually looking at a sophisticated garden, lovingly tended for generations. According to the elders Anderson interviewed, “wilderness” was not a positive concept in Native culture; it meant land that was not well tended, land in which human beings were not exercising their duty to protect, enhance, and develop life.
It is easy to see how the perception of indolent natives living in “virgin” wilderness facilitated intrusion onto their territory. After all, they were just inhabiting it; they weren’t developing it, they weren’t doing anything with it. It was going to waste. The ideology of the wild is of a piece with the ideology of conquest.
What looked to European settlers like untamed wilderness was actually the product of millennia of intentional human influence. Calling it wilderness, or “virgin territory,” gave them license to occupy it, cultivate it, “develop” it, and “improve” it.
This attitude is still wreaking its damage today in places like Brazil, where Amazonian tribes attempting to establish rights to their ancestral territory are required to prove the traditional occupancy of that territory. The difficulty is that their mark on the land is not of a kind that the government can easily recognize. They did not establish permanent farms or dwellings. The ideology of “the wild” renders the mutuality of their relationship to the land invisible.
Modern conservationists might be excused for wanting to minimize human impact, since the kind of human impact we’ve seen in the industrial era makes the caring observer recoil in horror. We might be excused for promoting an ethic of “leave no trace.” We might be excused for envisioning a future where humanity retreats to bubble cities, space colonies, or a virtual reality, leaving nature behind to recover its former wholeness, relating to it as a spectacle or a venue for recreation, visiting it perhaps as zero-impact ghosts, observers but not participants.
Tending the Wild suggests a different vision, freeing us from the perceptions with which industrial society has imbued us. Instead of zero impact, it suggests positive impact. Instead of leave no trace, it suggests “leave a beautiful trace” or “leave a healing trace.” It suggests that we ask, “What is our proper role and function in service to the health, harmony, and evolution of this whole of which we are a part?”
We have potent gifts of hand and mind that take the form of technology and culture. These gifts are not meant for us alone. They are meant to serve the wholeness and evolution of Life.
True, as a civilization we have not used our gifts in this way. Even pre-industrial peoples wreaked considerable havoc, contributing to the desertification of the Middle East and other areas, and to the disappearance of North and South America’s megafauna. The latter coincided with dramatic changes in the composition of vegetation: the extinction of mammoths, mastodons, and other megafauna led to forests replacing savannas in many parts of the continent, along with a steep decline in overall biodiversity22 and nutrient availability.23 Perhaps it was through the tragedy of these extinctions that the newcomers to North America learned to pay special attention to preserving and expanding what remained of the continent’s biological wealth.
Just because someone is indigenous does not mean he or she, or her culture, knows how to live in mutually beneficial harmony with the earth. It is something each culture must learn. Furthermore, each level of developmental scale requires a new learning.
Extinctions of megafauna and other animals and plants regularly followed human settlement of new lands. Australia, the Americas, New Zealand, Madagascar, and Polynesia all experienced them, suggesting a kind of inevitability to anthropogenic ecocide, which has only accelerated along with our capacity to perpetrate it. Yet, in the end, people in all of these places eventually came into equilibrium with their lands. In most places, as the subsequent biological wealth of the Americas exemplifies, it was an abundant and biodiverse equilibrium. This suggests another possibility beyond Man the Destroyer—that we can learn from our mistakes, that we can mature in our gifts and turn them toward a different purpose.
If so, then we have a lot to learn from indigenous people who sustainably tended and enriched the lands and waters they called home. Sometimes this might entail learning from their actual methods, but more probably it is a matter of adopting the mentality that gave birth to those methods in the first place, since the environment of ten thousand or even five hundred years ago is probably lost forever. That mentality is the product of the worldview I call the Story of Interbeing, a story that unites the diverse mythologies of indigenous peoples. More practically, it means forging intimate, respectful relationships with nature in its specific, local embodiment. Through extended close observation and interaction with nature, we can begin to hear answers to questions like “What does the river need?” “What does the mountain want?” “What is the dream of the land?”
These are the kind of questions that may take long, intimate observation—scientific and otherwise—to answer. There is no sure formula to determine which land should be grazed with compact herds, and which land should be protected from grazing entirely. There is no sure formula to determine which exotic species should be controlled as an “invasive,” and which should be welcomed for their contribution to a new balance.
This latter question is reflected in the debate between restoration ecologists, who seek to reverse ecological damage and bring back native species, and the “new ecologists” who question the assumptions behind the concept of restoration. Science writer Janet Marinelli describes the divide:
At a time when restoration of forests and other ecosystems is increasingly essential, the dominant paradigm of restoration science has been shaken to its core. Restoration ecologists, for whom returning lands to their state before the arrival of Europeans on the continent is still the basic, if rarely stated, goal, have been at loggerheads with so-called new ecologists, who challenge the primacy of native species in conservation thinking and champion the “novel ecosystems” of native and exotic species that increasingly dominate the planet.24
This passage hints at an emerging synthesis between the two positions. Human intervention is obviously necessary to restore ecosystems—not necessarily to their former state, but to a state of health. Yet, neither is their former state an irrelevancy. Historical knowledge is useful in understanding the land’s needs, where they came from, and how to meet them. No general formula can tell us, for example, when an invasive species needs to be controlled, and when it is actually an agent of a damaged ecosystem coming back into balance.25
Neither “trusting nature” nor “restoring ecosystems” offers a reliable recipe for action. The question is not whether to participate, but how. Absent a recipe, we are left with place-specific, intimate observation and sincere inquiry informed by the understanding of the nonlinear, living nature of each ecological being. That’s how we gain the wisdom to know how to participate in regenerating the health of the places and planet we inhabit.
All of the regenerative practices I’ve described in this chapter partake in a common sponsoring idea. Earth is alive. What is alive, we can love. What we love, we wish to serve. When what we love is sick, we want to ease its suffering and serve its healing. The more deeply we know it, the better we can join its healing.