Back down to earth
Angus Soutar
I don't know about you, but I'm getting fed up of hearing that we are in some kind of war. We've had the War on Drugs, War on Terror, War on CoViD, it's always some kind of war. And if it's not war outright, it's confict - conflict between young and old, between women and men, between various religions, ideologies and skin colours. Most people I know just want to get on with their lives. They don't want a lot of fighting, it just gets in the way.
There is one war that gets obscured by all the rhetoric. It's been going on for some time and it's probably the most damaging war of all: the War on Nature. We're not going to win this one. The Universe is a lot bigger than us and it doesn't really care whether we live or die. Most of our current difficulties are collateral damage from this war, I take them as a warning. We are destroying the very elements that keep us fed and healthy. There is so much fall-out that it's difficult to know where to start. But start we must.
Permaculture 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 thouight - 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 we've got tribe number two: "We've got electric cars and windmills and shiny solar panels, the 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 constructive, it will all be done for us. "All watched over by machines of loving grace".
None of this tribal thinking can help us deal with what's coming. I haven't signed up with either of tribe, and as a result I get loads of flack from both of them. I'm not optimistic about the future. But I'm not joining the doom and gloom brigade either. I'm staying positive. The human species has survived horrific challenges in order for us to get to where we are today. And the planet will be fine, whatever we do. So, what are we going to do about our future?
We've got a major problem with conventional agriculture - it is destroying soil and turning the world into a desert. Humans started this process about 10,000 years ago, but it's only quite late on in industrialisation, say since the 1950's, that we've prosecuted the war on soils with massive amounts of fossil fuels and their by-products. We are killing the soil that our food comes from. Nearly all of the food we buy in the supermarkets is contributing to this soil loss, especially food made from grains and soya.
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| Guardian article from December 2014 |
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Even if there is no climate change, we will still go on creating deserts at an increasing rate. When we make deserts we have a big problem. First we are destroying biodiversity which is a HUGE problem, probably THE problem. Secondly we are inviting climate change - because all these things that we are worried about are inter-connected. All problems are connected: destroy the soil, destroy biodiversity, destroy life.
If we have an emergency, then it's a Health Emergency - too many people reporting sick just when when we need more resilience. 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 issues we may be facing with Climate. At current rates of soil destruction, we will have run out of food long before the oceans rise to flood the land. Look at it this way - there is no Climate Emergency, It's a Climate Predicament. Predicaments are tricky and they have to be managed carefully. As agriculture changes to restore soil, so can it change to deal with the climate predicament. And we can mitigate climate variability as we go, with good permaculture design.
Clear thinking is difficult to do while we're in a panic. Let's stop frightening ourselves with Climate Change. Above all, let's stop frightening the children and teach them about soil-building instead.
Industrial farming destroys the carbon stores within the soil. On the other hand, regenerative farmers (inclide permaculture here) lock up carbon in the soil. Tracking "carbon" is at best some kind of proxy, at worst it can be a deception. The main problem we face is not the ever-elusive carbon cycle, it's land degradation on an industrial scale. It's highly likely if we don't revitalise the soil, then 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, which, following the Melankovic cycles, it probably will do in around 15,000 year's time. Meanwhile, let's get out there, build soil and reviatlise the landscape.
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