Back down to earth
Angus Soutar
“The Land is the Source or Matter from whence all Wealth is produced. The Labour of man is the Form which produces it: and the Wealth itself is nothing but the Maintenance, Conveniences, and Superfluities of Life.”
Richard Cantillon, 1730
Cloudy thinking
In the days before the Industrial Revolution, pioneer economists were quite clear about where wealth comes from; it comes from “The Land” and the plants that grow there. Scientific developments have enabled us to revise that statement: our wealth comes from the soil and from the sunlight that powers all growth. Then, as now, one of the main “conveniences of life” was food.
Permaculture has a philosophy of working with the Land and with the innate creativity of human beings to care for it. Bill Mollison defined our task as the harmonious integration of landscape and people. We aim to provide food, energy, shelter and to meet our other needs, material and non-material, in a sustainable way. To be "sustainable" means that our systems have to produce at least as much energy as they consume. This inevitably leads us towards greater local production and shorter supply chains. Our challenge is to create systems that ensure a sufficient supply of healthy food to local communities, with minimum external inputs.
By contrast, industrial society has taken us into a war with the land and most of the life forms on it. Our current difficulties - loss of biodiversity, pollution of the watercourses and our own poor health - are collateral damage. We must not ignore this war, for we are in the process of destroying the very elements that keep us fed and healthy. There is so much fall-out it's difficult to know where to start but start we must, and our approach with permaculture gives us the right direction.
Permaculture design requires us to observe what's going on, try to make sense of it and then take positive steps to look after ourselves. Our main obstacle is simplistic thinking, or perhaps no thinking at all. These days I seem to be pushed into joining one of two schools of thought - two tribes. There is the Doom and Gloom tribe, neatly summed up by the Henny Penny / Chicken Little morality tale: "The Sky is falling, the sky is falling". (I suggest you find that cautionary tale and read it through to the moral at the end.) In the extreme the doomer tribe believes "We're all going to die and there's nothing we can do about it". So they won't do anything constructive, we're all going to die, and that's it!
On the other hand, the second tribe says: "We've got electric cars and windmills and shiny solar panels; Artificial Intelligence will sort out everything for us and look, there's a unicorn flying over the Houses of Parliament". According to this tribe, we don't need to do anything, it will all be done for us."All watched over by machines of loving grace".
This tribal thinking doesn’t help us deal with what's coming. I haven't signed up to either tribe and consequently get flak from both. I'm not optimistic about the future but nor will I join the Doom and Gloom brigade. I’ve decided to stay positive; the human species has survived horrific challenges for us to get to where we are today. Natural systems have amazing powers of adaptation and regeneration. If the worst comes to the worst, the planet will get along fine without us. The pressing question is: what are we going to do about the future of our species?
We have a major threat from conventional agriculture; it is destroying soil and turning the world into deserts. We humans started this process about 10,000 years ago, but industrialisation led us to prosecute full scale War on Soils, by using massive amounts of fossil fuels and their by-products. We are killing the soil that our food comes from. Nearly all the food we buy in the supermarkets is contributing to soil loss, and especially foods made from grains and soya.
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| Guardian article from December 2014 |
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A Soil Emergency
To secure our future, we must deal with this Soil Emergency. Even if the "Climate" remains unchanged, we will still go on creating deserts at an increasing rate. When we make deserts, we make big problems. Firstly, we are destroying biodiversity which is a HUGE problem, probably THE problem. Secondly we are then inviting the Climate Change that so many people fear. Once we abandon simplistic thinking, we begin to realise that the things we worry about are actually inter-connected. All problems are connected: destroy the soil, destroy biodiversity, destroy life.
This is contributing to a Health Emergency; increasing numbers of people are sick just when we need the population to be more resilient. So this Health Emergency is part of a Food Emergency and we won't be able to solve that until we deal with the Soil Emergency. This is much more pressing than any of issues associated with changes in the Climate. At current rates of soil destruction, we will have run out of food long before the oceans rise to flood the land.
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| Andrew :Langford demonstrates soil loss on an Oxfordshire field to a visiting reporter | Close up of soil loss - Oxfordshire clay is one of the most fertile soils in the British Isles |
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Perhaps it’s helpful to look at it this way: we have a Climate Predicament, not a Climate Emergency. Predicaments are tricky and need to be managed carefully. As agriculture changes to restore soil, so it can change to deal with the climate predicament and we can use good permaculture design to mitigate climate variability as we go. It is difficult to think clearly when we are in a state of panic. Let's stop frightening ourselves about Climate Change. Above all, let's stop frightening the children and instead, teach them how to build soil.
Industrial farming destroys the carbon stores within the soil. On the other hand, permaculture and regenerative farming lock up significant amounts of carbon in the soil. Tracking "carbon" is at best some kind of proxy, at worst it can be a deception. We don't need "carbon accounting" to tell us that land degradation is destroying carbon stores on an industrial scale.
If we don't revitalise the soil, it is highly likely that fertility (and our food) will disappear long before the ice-caps melt. The climate is changing and we can argue how much is due to human activity till hell freezes over. (According to the Milanković cycles, this will probably take place in around 15,000 years’ time). Meanwhile, let's get out there, build soil and revitalise the landscape.
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This article formed part of Angus's talk "Local Food - Getting it Together" delivered at The Peoples Reset: UK conference in Bath on 27th September 2024