a new math

We are so used to this type of math:

                                    100 - 30 = 70

 But how about this instead?

                                    100 - 30 = 110

The first equation is how conventional agriculture works.  We grow and harvest crops, which deplete the soil of nutrients and minerals, the soil erodes (it literally flies away at alarming rates because the soil lies bare from fall to spring and the wind takes it away), we desperately throw chemical fertilizer and pesticides at it, the ecosystem degrades, insect and bird populations shrink, carbon goes up, we eek out another harvest until the input needs to be increased yet again.

Although there are wide differences in organic practices, the organic label or certification more or less only specifies a clean version of conventional agriculture in that the chemical fertilizers and pesticides are substituted with natural inputs (and no GMOs permitted).  Still, mostly purchased inputs, but not toxic, process is similar.  Soil and mineral content are certainly richer than compared to conventional agriculture, and organic practices maintain the soil, but they don’t by definition regenerate it. Sheldon Frith explains that the main difference between organic and regenerative agriculture is that organic is mainly chemically based, while regenerative is ecologically and biologically based.  

Regenerative agriculture is based on the premise that through a complete understanding of, and cooperation in sync with, the local ecosystem, we end up with something better than where we started.  Wow! Sounds unreal? Regenerative agriculture works without outside inputs and actually rebuilds the soil and ecosystem on an ongoing basis, and even though the crops extract minerals and nutrients from the soil, as time goes by the ecosystem becomes stronger and more complex, and the soil healthier. Regenerative agricultural systems are unique and local with no one-size-fits-all prescriptions.  Biodynamic agriculture and permaculture are such regenerative agricultural models and I have written about them previously.

Key features of regenerative agriculture are the rebuilding and retention of our depleted topsoil through no-till practices and growing perennial crops (I have previously written about these too), the reestablishment of grasslands, and carbon sequestration, among others. Healthier soil means more mineral and nutrient rich food for us, a healthier ecosystem all around, and packing some of that surplus carbon away into the soil.  

Don’t ditch your Prius yet, but this practice counters climate change! Win-win!  

on fire

Cooking on electric or gas?   I have always preferred cooking on fire (gas, that is), even though it meant remaining with a fossil fuel when I had the choice of going electric.  Cooking on gas is of course very different from cooking on an actual wood fire, the way famed chef Francis Mallman has perfected it. Yet, it's one step closer to actual fire cooking than cooking on an electric stove, which seems more abstract because the fire element is gone.  When I cook I actually look at the size of the flame when turning up or down.   Cooking on gas gives me the feeling that I have a more direct relationship with my heat source, more control.  I see the fire, and I see if the flame is big or small, and can gauge my heat source in a more direct, perhaps more primitive way.

We humans have a special relationship with fire.  Fire is something primal.  Staring into a fire is mesmerizing, whether in a fireplace, into a candle or outdoors.  Fire, just like other nature elements, can be destructive and constructive.  Maybe there is a bit of tension in managing a fire so it's safe, so it can warm us, so we can cook our food with it, so we feel in charge of it.

This past weekend we sat outside by a fire after dark. A friend was watching my husband, who has mastered the art of making a fire, tending to it, adding to it, managing it, reviving it, and finally letting it die down peacefully, and was in awe of the quiet, yet steady and ongoing process to keep it going gently.  Natalie Wolchover writes that indigenous people, in contrast to us Westerners, only retain their fire fascination until they have managed fire. We Westerners don't necessarily have a very close relationship with fire, especially not with open fire, as our friend realized.   I don't know either how to properly start a barbecue, how to make a fireplace fire, how to start and manage an outdoor fire.   Is that why I feel a closer relationship to cooking on gas?  Is that Western fire fascination due to my inability to manage an actual outdoor fire?  What do you prefer, gas or electric?  And why?

so much more fabulous

It's alive!  Nature, I mean.  You may have known it all along, or perhaps you're stumped when I say that. The rock under your feet may seem inert and dead.  Crystals are pretty and that's just that.  The trees are doing their growing thing and that's nice because we love shade and timber.   Or you may be on a different path.  If you have animals you know that they have a soul, feelings, character, and you love your pet as if it were your child.   Perhaps you've experienced crystal healing, or you talk to your plants and nurture your garden.

For several hundred years scientists could not have ventured to say something about Nature's inherent intelligence without being discredited.  We deemed indigenous people, who always believed in Nature's sacredness and aliveness, beneath our scientifically oriented "enlightened" mind. 

But science is only true science if we ask all questions and leave the answers to our inquiries open instead of trying to prove what we want confirmed because it conveniently fits within our thinking.  Things shifted a bit with James Lovelock's Gaia Theory in the 1970s, but now the tides are really turning.  "We are transitioning into the reality where everything's alive," author Charles Eisenstein noted.   When your houseplants thrive because you talk to them, maybe it's not an accident that they look beautiful and lush.  When you harvest steadily, Nature picks up on it and produces more, summarizing the gist of Robin Wall Kimmerer's scientific research in her book Braiding Sweetgrass.  Trees are not only connected under the earth via the mycorrhizal mushroom network, something of a botanical nutrient and information internet, they also nurture, help, send information, cooperate, and protect each other, as  Smithsonian Magazine explains in an article about the work of tree researcher Peter Wohlleben.

Nature's intelligence imbues everything, is all pervasive, and we're part of it, not apart from it, as Fritjof Capra and the Francesco Varela/Humberto Maturana team have maintained for years.  Recognition of this intelligence that's all around us and in us, is us, leads to a greater respect for nature, a spirit of cooperation with it, awe for its beauty and perfection, and openness to learning from it and being inspired.  We thought we knew (almost) everything.  But the more we open our mind to Nature's miraculousness and intelligence, the more we discover that we still know so little, that there is so much more to discover, and that life becomes more fabulous the more we pursue this direction.

wow!

Sometimes the beauty and perfection in everything only appears to us while observing nature.   Whether sparkly sunshine, feathery clouds, fabulous color combinations of a cloudy sky or sunset, feeling the breeze in your hair, or smelling the freshness in your nose.  

Nothing manmade comes close in intricacy, detail and complexity to these fleeting moments or sights.  And "coming close" is a pun intended because some of the intricacies don't show up until you get real close.  

It doesn't take an effort to see the intricacy of this bird feather's different textures, the breathtaking beauty of the iridescent color play in the sunshine, or even the amazing color complexities in this tiny piece of nature.  All it takes is a willingness to slow down and take the time to go deep and actually look and see.

a fish out of water

By now we are all familiar with the benefits of shopping locally.  When you purchase what you can in your own community you support people, your local merchants directly, instead of the corporations of the big box stores, and strengthen the fabric of your downtown.  Shopping locally for produce puts money directly into your local farmers' pockets, not the supermarket corporation.  Here a post on localism and a related post of voting with your $. 

Permaculture (here a post on that), a fairly new agricultural system, has always worked with native plants.  Now we are beginning to expand our awareness to the benefits of using native plants in our gardens - gardening localism.   

Plants that naturally evolved in a particular habitat are inherently hardier, which means more resistant to weather extremes and more resilient to pests.  Native plants have stronger genetic material than hybrids, and are biologically more diverse.  Perhaps you have heard that Peru's staple, the potato, comes in almost four thousand different varieties!  Now that is biodiversity.  Each potato variable developed within its own little ecosystem of weather and soil conditions, and thrives in that particular small patch of land.  A hybrid, on the other hand, was developed in a research facility, out of context of particular local soil and weather conditions.  When such a hybrid is introduced into an out-of-context garden ecosystem that plant is like a fish out of water.  

friend or foe?

Nature is reestablishing itself on our property after all the construction, landscaping, and upheaval before our move here almost four years ago.  Small trees are coming up and filling in where trees came down or were taken down, the land is settling, and wildlife is moving in again.  

Two days ago our daughter came home and showed me a video on her phone of two long black snakes slithering into the rock wall as she came up the stairs.  Wow!  They looked quite impressive.  We had never seen anything bigger than a garter snake in our garden.  My husband quickly identified our new garden companions as harmless black rat snakes. The next morning both slithering reptiles were out sunning themselves, but quickly disappeared into their rocky home when they sensed my footsteps. Later, one of them visited the herb garden.  But they are shy and run away from us.

My attitude was ambivalent about these two new garden buddies.  Should I be scared?  Should I mind?  How to share my private paradise with what would send many a friend to flee?  But these two snakes found a perfect home in the chunky rock wall, they are not dangerous to us, and they attest to the fact that nature is healing after all the upheaval we inflicted on it.  

I have decided to make friends with them, share my garden with them, appreciate that animal life is moving back into this wooded territory we so rudely disrupted for our own purpose.  They have moved in for good and will undoubtedly keep the chipmunk population in check.  I look out the window and see if they are out sunning themselves.   They can have the garden when we're not around, and they willingly cede it to us when we want to be outside.  We will coexist peacefully.  After all we need to learn to live in harmony with nature again.

where's the farmer?

Do you know the chickens that lay your eggs?  Do you know in what condition they live?  Do you know what they eat? Do you know the farmer who grows your vegetables?  Do you know about his methods?  Do you know about his soil?  Do you get your vegetables as soon as they are harvested? Do you know where your meat comes from (if you eat meat)?  Have you chatted with the farmer who runs the farm?  Do you know his practices?  Have you seen how the animals live?  Are treated? Find their end?  

In former times we knew how all of this worked. Then we lost touch because we went shopping at the supermarket.  But when the kids start to believe that eggs, or meat, or apples come from the supermarket it's time to go visit a farm and talk to the farmer.

every bit helps

A few days ago I saw a small, unassuming house with just a few solar panels on the roof.   Sometimes you leave your reusable shopping bags at home when you go the supermarket and have to pick up one of those flimsy single-use plastic bags that often end up in the trees.  The other day I forgot to bring water to my exercise class and had to buy a bottle.

It's ok.  It's the willingness that counts, the growing awareness.  When you remember most of the time it slowly becomes part of your culture.   It matters if you care and do a little bit often.  

Caring for the environment, even just a bit, on this Earth Day weekend, is what our planet needs so much from all of us at this time.

honorable harvest

...the Native American concept of "taking only what you need, and using everything you took,"  needs no further explanation.  Also consider rereading a previous related blog post nose-to-tail.

inspirited

            I had encountered this word previously in an eco-spiritual context.  Now I read it again in Braiding Sweetgrass, Robin Wall Kimmerer's melding of her Native American background's eco-spiritual understanding of the natural world and her scientific education as a botanist.

            The best of both worlds, in my perception, involves indeed the broadening of our scientific worldview, which is naked and somewhat devoid on its own, and doesn't tell the whole story.  We are slowly coming around to understanding that.

            As an example, Kimmerer tells of a two-year scientific investigation into the link between depletion of sweetgrass in particular areas and the lack of harvesting it for the purpose of weaving baskets in that same area.  Put differently, there is a link between ongoing tending to and harvesting of sweetgrass, and its increased vigor and growth.  This is something science can't explain because, according to its paradigm, harvesting equals depletion, not the other way round.  Yet Native Americans, and all who have a green thumb and speak to their flowers, or pets for that matter, or biodynamic farmers who farm "spiritually" and "homeopathically," know that we are connected to Nature, we are in ongoing communication with Nature, and that Nature is inspirited in some way, not dead.  In order to live sustainably we must recognize the reciprocal relationship with Nature we exist in, and the inspiritedness of it.  It's a win-win for both side.