nature

Nature, through design or evo­lu­tion, one not excluding the other, has estab­lished sophis­ti­cated equi­lib­riums, feed­back loops, and cycles (water, carbon, nutri­ents), all pow­ered by one source: our cen­tral star.

We humans in our cur­rent state of mind how­ever prefer mono-linear cause-effect, a lot helps a lot, more of the same, trying harder the next time rather than trying dif­fer­ently. But humans are part of nature, so why have we turned out this way? Why are we at the same time the cleverest species and the dumbest, most vicious on the planet?

We know a lot, aca­d­e­m­i­cally, and we also have tried a lot prac­ti­cally – Per­ma­cul­ture, Terra Preta, agro­forestry, dyke-pond system, aqua­cul­ture (the type where you estab­lish a sophis­ti­cated “friendly” micro­bi­ology, pre­cluding the use of any antibi­otics or nas­ties in there) – these are fan­tastic ways of cul­ti­vating with nature rather than against it. They need to become the main­stream, for humanity to sur­vive with a quality of life. This is not scaremongering.

Through trying to operate cir­cular nature with mono-linear cul­ti­va­tion methods, we have brought about rapid degen­er­a­tion and pri­marily local cli­mate change. We see alarm­ingly reduced soil fer­tility and sig­nif­i­cantly more freaky weather con­di­tions, droughts and flooding – but since the latter is all sta­tis­tics, you cannot say with per­fect cer­tainty that it’s down to global warming / cli­mate change. It’s not about the 2 degrees or more that the global average tem­per­a­ture may rise. It’s about our cli­mate being thrown out of kilter.

Cli­mate change has to be seen in the con­text of top soil ero­sion and alarming loss of soil fer­tility, and the dis­tur­bance of nature’s most impor­tant func­tions, which are: 1) bal­ancing out the daily solar irra­di­a­tion peak, and 2) retaining water and nutri­ents in the system. These two func­tions are linked, as nature uses the hydrology cycle to dis­si­pate and smooth out the solar energy input mainly by evap­o­ra­tion and con­den­sa­tion of water, the sub­stance with the highest spe­cific heat capacity on the planet (slightly beaten only by lithium at 181 degrees C!). This cooling effect during the day is most notice­able in or near marsh­land, swamps or (intact) forests. Nature also keeps nutri­ents on site, mostly bound in bio­mass (humus, veg­e­ta­tion, bac­teria, plankton and ani­mals) and opti­mises the nutrient cycle by min­imising waste. (Loss of species diver­sity is a symptom often asso­ci­ated with the degra­da­tion of these vital func­tions, as diverse nat­ural com­mu­ni­ties often per­form best at ful­filling these functions.)

Now, humans have degraded these sys­tems and opened the hydrology and nutrient cycles, gen­er­ating lots of waste, accel­er­ating by fac­tors of 10s to 100s the leaching of nutri­ents into the oceans. For the time being, we are able to main­tain agri­cul­tural pro­duc­tivity by using high amounts of fossil fuels, not least for pro­ducing nitrogen fer­tiliser from atmos­pheric nitrogen by way of the hugely energy-inten­sive Haber-Bosch process. And while fossil fuel isn’t exactly run­ning out, we had (or are very close to) the pro­duc­tion max­imum or “peak oil” (tem­porarily shrouded by the cur­rent hydraulic frac­turing or fracking hype). Obtaining and burning fossil fuels has many neg­a­tive effects on the land­scape and human health, a major one being water pol­lu­tion, but I’m going off on a tangent.

We also encap­su­late bio­mass with high levels of “toxins” in it (sludge/biosolids) and with­hold it from the nat­ural cycles. Nature has sophis­ti­cated ways of dealing with most of these “toxins”, including seques­tering heavy metals.

And by the way, this com­pletely harm­less yet all hyped-up CO₂ has a minor role in cli­mate change, which, as explained, hap­pens mostly locally due to destruc­tively opening up the hydrology and nutrient cycles. Due to the colossal infat­u­a­tion with this “see oh too” stuff, a vast majority of effort has been con­cen­trated on dealing with curbing emis­sion of it, and given rise to a highly prof­itable eco­nomic bubble called carbon trading.

So in sum­mary, cli­mate change is not a scare, it’s a very real and increasing threat, it’s just that our per­spec­tive, and thence our reme­dial efforts, have become almost com­pletely side-tracked.

Sources

Spe­cific heat capacity (incl. table near the bottom):

• en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_capacity

On the highest-level threat of soil ero­sion (just a few exam­ples among many):

• www.fao.org/docrep/t0389e/t0389e02.htm
• www.earth-policy.org/books/out/ote5_2
• worldwildlife.org/threats/soil-erosion-and-degradation

On water being the master agent in (local) cli­mate change:

• aquaterra-berlin.de (German only -- Sys­teminstitut Aqua Terra (SAT), an inde­pen­dent insti­tute grown out of the former insti­tute for lim­nology at the Tech­nical Uni­ver­sity of Berlin, led by Prof. Wil­helm Ripl)
• “Back from the Brink: How Aus­tralia’s Land­scape Can Be Saved” by Peter Andrews, a farmer in Aus­tralia who expe­ri­enced the effect of water reten­tion in the land­scape first-hand, by restoring func­tioning veg­e­ta­tion cover, a work that was informed and assisted by Prof. Ripl. Peter Andrews’ web­site around Nat­ural Sequence Farming is at www.nsfarming.com.