What’s the biggest threat humans pose to Nature? War? Mining? Cars/ trucks? Much as they are horrible and threaten Earth with imminent destruction, you’re wrong. It’s agriculture!! That’s George Monbiot’s latest revelation in Regenesis: feeding the world without destroying the planet (2022), his Long March to a Better World. In our misguided industrial agriculture, we are constantly attacking the thin, delicate membrane that holds the precious substance that allows all living things to … LIVE.

Monbiot starts with hints of our past awe of, love affair with Nature, trying to find and use its secrets, before we turned it into a slave to function as we want, ignoring its mystery. In midwinter, Britons would go awassailing in their orchards. A pre-science ‘scientific method’ of wandering (staggering) through your orchard singing and drinking cider.

For more or lesse fruits they will bring, as you do give them Wassailing.

Make friends with Nature but also be in awe of its mysteries. How many names end in ‘ley’. Horsley, Wellesley, Barclay. A ley is a strip of wildflowers you plant between your crops to attract pollinators and regenerate the land. ‘Our’ land. Britons loved and cherished it because they were born and would die there. Not sell it, abandon it, leaving a jilted lover bereft, ruined.

We know that sugars move from healthy trees’ roots to weak ones. Cool. Altruism? Sheldrake: Fungi are farming their hosts, shifting food to ensure all those they depend on remain alive. Mycelium are intelligent. They have directional memory, navigate labyrinths with electric pulses like animal sensory nerve cells. Networks like a computer or brain synapses.

First Law of Nature: a little knowledge is a dangerous thing. Even when we mean well, we are probably wrong, as Nature has many mysteries that we will never fully understand. Corollary: Do no harm. Ie, don’t add more of our poison or try to sterilize the little blighter.

Plants release up to 40% of their hard-earned sugars into soil to feed fungi surrounding its roots, the rhizosphere, their external gut. Hmm. We have long classified what’s above the soil: the troposphere, stratosphere, mesosphere, thermosphere, and exosphere. A plant is like a little planet with its own spheres. Soil is the land equivalent of a corral reef: places of intense biological activity especially the rhizosphere (but also other spheres – drilosphere (earthworms), myrmecosphere (ants)). Every living thing has its own planetary logic. Yet we are still treating soil as ‘dirt’, a dumping ground, and plants as willing slaves needing our gruel with a bit of flavoring. And if the slave produces little, then whip him and forcefeed him till he smartens up (or you inadvertently kill him).

Our relationship to the land is: kill, poison, destroy, ignore, trash. Whereas this complex life is the basis of our lives. We recognize only one sphere, our egospheres. And we barely register anyone else’s, let alone other living things, which are never spheres in isolation, but all linked, and linked to so-called inert matter, which its own needs. We know-it-alls are blissfully ignorant of 90% of what goes on around us.

Complex chemicals create and manage a series of marvelously intricate relationships with the creatures on which all life stands: microbes. Soil is crammed with bacteria. The earthy scent is the smell of the chemicals they produce. No two soils smell the same, just like no two people. Just ask a dog about the information packed into smell.

Microbes live in suspended animation till they get messages that wake them up. A plant’s roots trigger an explosion of activity. The bacteria gather and unlock the nutrients for the plants. Bacteria and fungi are meshed with the roots. Other microbes capture iron, phosphorus and other elements for the plants, break up complex organic compounds so the roots can absorb them, turn inert nitrogen into minerals (nitrate and ammonium) to make proteins. Like our stomachs the rhizosphere’s microbes break down organic material, letting us produce energy.

Human breast milk contains sugars which babies can’t digest but which bacteria in our gut eat. Similarly, plants support beneficial bacteria species so they can crowd out pathogenic microbes and fungi. They use chemical warfare! Antibiotics are all found first in soil bacteria.i Microbes stimulate the plant’s immune system! When soil is harmed by fertilizer, pesticides, fungicides, excessive plowing or crushing, their cry for help is heard not just by their friends in the rhyzosphere, but by parasites and pests, causing dysbiosis, i.e., collapse of plant’s gut communities (ditto for humans). Doctors take stool samples from healthy people and transplant them into the guts of unhealthy patients, so maybe we should do the same—add some good soil to sick, weak soil to suppress pathogenic bacteria and fungi, rather than smothering the weak with chemicals or trying to sterilize it.

One of Monbiot’s university lecturers told him, ‘I study insects because I love them but the only funding I can get is to kill them.’ There are no soil ecology institutes anywhere on Earth. Lots of Big Chem institutes urging nitrogen fertilizers, where blowback means that microbes burn through the carbon in the soil as if on crack, which disintegrates the soil structure. When it collapses, oxygen and water can no longer permeate, leading to (fractal) breakdown of the soil meta-structure. It becomes sodden, compacted, airless. Over-fertilizing actually reduces the plant’s access to nutrients. ‘Breaking the soil’ to grow crops is a good (i.e. bad) metaphor. What a perfect example of ‘A little knowledge is a dangerous thing’.

Complex systems possess emergent properties, behave in complex ways when their components come together.ii The worst/ best example of emergen-cy is the underlying theme of Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath: Every man hates what a bank does but the bank does it. The bank is something more than men. It’s the monster. Men made it but they can’t control it. When a system collapses, flips, experiences hysteresis, it requires much more energy to recreate the magic of the whole than was needed to destroy it. We happily break the soil, but woe if we break the bank. For both, it’s very hard, expensive, (impossible?) to try to put Humpty Dumpty together again.

Second Law of Nature: A system is resilient if the mesh of nodes and links (e.g. fishing net) are flexible, their links to each other weak (who eats whom, bank links to commerce and industry). Corollary: There should be a backup system working within or alongside the main network that operates on different principles, plenty of redundancy as a shock absorber. Our efforts to improve performance in our own small corner of a system often weaken the system as a whole. Every time we try to enhance the efficiency of a business or process, we reduce its redundancy. Any attempt to save ‘too big to fail’ leads to unimaginable (bad) effects on the system as a whole. The specter of 2008 still haunts us.

Convergence toward a ‘global standard diet’ pushes us out onto the gangplank, blindfold. Before, the world had radically different diets, some good, some bad, but distinct. From the 1960s, spreading rapidly around the world, one diet has body-slammed the peculiarities of place and culture out of its path. We eat food that’s dense in energy, more ready calories, more vegetable oil, fat, protein, fewer roots and tubers. Just four plants—wheat, rice, corn and soybean—account for 60% of calories. The US is one of the largest producers of all four, along with Brazil, France, Canada, Russia and........

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