Everything is Connected - Part 2
“You push an ecological system too far and suddenly all the rules change” Robert Paine
Genesis 1:26-28 tells us “And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth. So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them. And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.”
So begins a story which we have developed, embellished and rationalised about how we humans believe we have conquered nature.
And yet nature always wins, if you don’t believe me just take a look at the various civilisations and cultures of the past that we uncover through archaeology, marvelling at the technology they developed thousands of years ago. The key word in that sentence is ‘uncover’ because often we stumble across the evidence of the past, not through any artifice or design, but because someone ploughs up a field and comes across an ancient hoard or the remains of a building. We might, if we are lucky, be able to spot the telltale marks of an ancient settlement in the landscape if we’re looking from above, but that’s rare without having some inkling that perhaps the area was important in the past.
Change is a constant, it’s also a truth that sometimes we handily decide to forget in our determined march towards some vision of a supposed technocratic utopia that serves only a small minority of the population of our planet. If you pay attention, you’ll see the evidence of change everywhere; from the way the body ages as it journeys through life, to the social shifts and dynamics that occur as a result of shifts in people and place, and eventually even in the way the weeds take over a once carefully cultivated plot.
Change is a natural and entirely predictable phenomenon but somehow we’ve come to view it as an affront unless of course, that change is something we humans have created and desire. We object to the changing coastlines of our islands and continents. Somehow we believe that volcanos, earthquakes, tsunamis and hurricanes are evidence that we’re not controlling the environment well enough and demand that ‘something should be done’ to protect communities from the powerful effects of nature, forgetting that we often choose to build exactly where nature is at it’s rawest.
If we are so powerful, we say, why can’t we bend the weather to our will? Why can’t we Canute like, hold the tide back? Why can’t we predict the way a ripple will move across a pond in response to our thrown stone? The answer to all of these questions is that we are not God.
Somehow we have come to assume we can hold back death by controlling the whole environment. We believe the adverts that tell us ‘Dettol kills 99% of germs’ without realising that those same germs often play a significant part in our long-term health. We believe we can sanitise the world of all supposed pathogens without remembering that our bodies themselves are a cornucopia of dependent viruses and bacteria and that we live in symbiosis with this internal environment.
We have forgotten that we are an integral and intrinsic part of nature, that we are dominated by her and subject to her laws as surely as the rabbit, the tree, the sea or the mountain. Every bit of us is nature personified. Whatever we eat or drink is derived from nature. Of course, it is often far removed from its natural origins these days, packaged and primped in combinations of ingredients that don’t belong in any human body, but they all have their origins in the environment that surrounds us.
Nothing comes from nothing. The food we eat, the energy we consume, and the paraphernalia that surrounds us all come from the natural environment. Nothing is magicked out of nothing, even nuclear reactions require an atom to get started, as well as the constructed technology to split it.
Here in Dorset, we recently took on an overgrown allotment. It’s been 15 months since we started working on our tiny patch to produce food to eat. My husband has been doing research about the best way to cultivate what we want to grow and stumbled across ‘no-dig’, a way of working with the soil that preserves its integrity and enhances its productivity. It’s organic as far as it can be when some of our fellow allotmenteers spray and bait in an effort to sanitise their plots; it’s easier because you don’t have to dig the plot over, dig in compost or even dig in the plants themselves; it’s cheaper because we aren’t buying the fertiliser made with the gas we apparently don’t have. Instead, we use lots of waste cardboard to suppress the weeds as well as tons of well-rotted manure delivered for £10 twice yearly by a local farmer.
The results speak for themselves. Within our first year, we cropped salads, radishes, cucumbers, 130lb of potatoes, tomatoes, squash, courgettes, sweet corn, peas and beans, brussel sprouts, cabbages, carrots, onions, garlic, cauliflower, kale, spinach, blackberries, blackcurrants, raspberries, gooseberries and rhubarb. The photo at the top of this article is our kitchen window lined with some of the squash we harvested just a couple of months ago.
I say all this not because I want to brag and boast (even though I do brag and boast to anyone who will listen), but because I have started coming across claims online that there are just 60, 70 or even 100 harvests left such as the one posted at FAO website1. And although I couldn’t find any evidence for these claims I did come across many researchers talking about the very real impact of soil erosion and degradation caused by the way we grow food. Researchers at the University of Sheffield looked at the health of soils in and around Sheffield and concluded that soil in city allotments was healthier than in surrounding arable fields. The paper says that the results demonstrate the extent to which modern agricultural practices have degraded soil2.
According to the UN’s Global Land Outlook report “Healthy and productive land resources – soil, water, and biodiversity – are the foundation of our societies and economies.” It goes on to say that “some $44 trillion of economic output (half of global GDP) is dependent to some extent on what it calls natural capital” 3 (emphasis my own).
Whilst the statement is true, it misses the point entirely.
EVERYTHING we depend on to survive and thrive on this planet. EVERYTHING all other species depend on to survive and thrive comes from that “natural capital”. And perhaps the problem lies in the title ‘natural capital’.
While I was putting this essay together I was sent the latest essay from Charles Eisenstein who confirms “Natural capital refers to the wealth of the land, the soil, the water, and the living world. Its conversion transforms forests into board-feet of lumber, ecosystems into strip mines, earth into commodities, oceans into seafood production facilities, and ultimately, all of these into money.”
Unfettered capitalism which underlies these assumptions about nature’s bounty, commodifies everything. Nature is no longer sacred to be held in trust for us and those who follow us instead, it has to be raped and pillaged in a relentless effort to get one more dollar or pound in someone’s bank account.
The reason the claims about a lack of future harvests are appearing is that, even if we can’t quantify the reality, they point towards something we all instinctively know, you can’t do anything with nothing.
And yes, I have noted the apparent contradiction in my statements, if everything comes from the planet we live on, including the chemicals and fertilisers, surely it doesn’t matter because it’s all ‘natural’ at the source! But that belies the problem. The raw materials may be drawn from the earth’s resources but they are manufactured into things that don’t appear in nature. We, the planet and its inhabitants have evolved to work with nature, not against it. When we manufacture nature out of itself, we are the ones that ultimately suffer.
When we look at agri-business what is the incentive to change the way they work? Where is the incentive for global corporations like Monsanto to change the fertiliser and chemicals they make? And where is the incentive for farmers and others producing the food the majority of us eat, to change the way they grow crops?
Perhaps it lies in a movement like no-dig. Did you know, healthy soils are full of biodiversity? 1 gm of organic soil contains 30,000 protozoa, 50,000 algae, and 400,000 fungi. One teaspoon of living soil contains 1 billion bacteria which translates to 1 tonne per acre. One square cubic metre of soil contains 1000 earthworms, 50,000 insects, and 12 trillion roundworms 4.
Charles Dowding and others like him have rediscovered a method of gardening and growing that works with nature. They regularly point to the increase in yields, productivity and soil health within as little as 12 months of starting out.
If we insist on referring to it as ‘natural capital’, maybe just the increase in profits from working in such a way might be the thing that turns the tide. Maybe!
I have no idea how feasible it is for agri-businesses to adopt a ‘no-dig’ approach to growing crops; I suspect it’s possible but would require a significant shift back towards an agriculturally based economy and lifestyle. But I do know that what we grow and consume is what creates our bodies. If we are growing mono-crops sprayed with chemical fertilisers and insecticides, and if we are pumping the animals we raise for meat with hormones and treatments they only need because they are intensively farmed, at some point we will ingest these and our bodies will become that which we eat.
The title of these essays is ‘everything is connected’ and in the first, I wrote about energy and gas and their lack (apparently) thereof. When we take a holistic view we can see that reducing the amount of chemical fertiliser used frees up gas supplies to heat homes elsewhere. When we focus on using well-rotted compost, however, it is made, we see it reduces the amount of fuel used to transport composts made away from where we live. And when we think about providing food made to nature’s standards, not Kraft’s, then we see a positive impact on the health of the people and animals around us.
The more we pour our efforts into trying to find an acceptable technological way to solve the problems we think we have, the more we dig the hole we’re in even deeper. Once we realise we don’t have to waste the resources available to us doing things that ultimately don’t work, then life becomes that much easier to live and navigate, for everyone.
You may think I’m naive, but I can’t stop thinking about how the dots are all lining up and it’s our job to join them until we get to the collective moment when we all go ‘Oh, so that’s how it works!’ Over the coming month’s I’ll be adding more dots to the picture, hopefully by the time I’ve finished (if it ever finishes) we’ll see things much more clearly.
For millennia, we have been trying to prove we are outside of, better than and more than, nature.
We’ve failed.
Perhaps it’s time to embrace what we are and accept that we too are part of a delicately balanced system that connects everything to everything else. One that is a beautiful, essential, shimmering golden thread that connects us to all that is, and will be.
Edmondson, J.L., Davies, Z.G., Gaston, K.J. & Leake, J.R. (2014). Urban cultivation in allotments maintains soil qualities adversely affected by conventional agriculture. Journal of Applied Ecology, 51:880–889