This is the World Organic News for the week ending the 5th of August 2019.
Jon Moore reporting!
Decarbonise the air, recarbonise the soil!
I posted a link on the Facebook page much earlier today about the rate of ice melt on Greenland. I then saw footage of the event on the news. Now instead of this tipping me into a depressive funk, it energised me and I hope to bring you all along with me in this enthusiasm!
We have, I’m sure, heard of the tipping point. That set of conditions where all the measurements, data and lived experience results in a change to the “new” normal.
We’ve all been through this in life, or we will. A moment of satori, a blinding flash of inspiration and our lives will never be the same again. Me before and after my first parachute jump is one such example. Back when I did this we weren’t strapped to an experienced jumper, we went on static lines that open the chute for us. I have no words for the change that occurred in those two minutes from aeroplane to ground but I was a different person.
Stay with me, we’ll get to the soil and air soon.
The melting Greenland glaciers on the TV put me in mind of the tipping point, the moments of change and podcast I heard a month or so ago.
The episode was on systems change. The key takeaway was that everything changes all at once.
“Everything Changes All At Once”
If we think back to the financial crisis of 2007, things changed so quickly that we entered a new world almost overnight.
- A new normal had arrived.
- The fall of the Soviet Union was a similar event
- As was the birth of the Soviet Union
- This was related to WWI
- To be fair, WWI was a longer systems change but change things did.
To the point:
- Things change, all the time
- Major changes, as we live them happen quickly
- In retrospect they seem obvious
- Compromised financial instruments
- Internal tensions in the Soviets
- A moribund Tsarist regime and so on.
We are at or near a similar set of circumstances:
- Rising obesity levels with the ubiquitous American diet
- Collapsing bee numbers
- Soil losses every year
- Monsanto actually being sued
- Year long fire seasons
- Melting glaciers
- Bits falling off the antarctic ice sheet
- Five month long floods in the US
- Fires in Siberia
- Pacific Island states drowning as sea levels rise.
I could go on.
What’s to be done?
- Let’s assume the paradigm is already shifting
- Are we able to work in a biomimicry system?
- Can we grow our own food?
I’ll just step away from the narrative for a moment to say I’m not a doomsday prepper. Most of the ones I’ve seen on the telie don’t inspire much confidence.
But what we actually need to do is seize the levers we can.
- Solar PV at the household level probably combined with a battery of some sort
- Planting for pollinators
- Growing at least some of food
- Now I know this food thing seems hard for non-gardeners but it really isn’t
- No dig/no till beds, accumulating organic matter with a passion and open pollinated seeds are it basically and you can grow a substantial
- Community gardens are also a great way to learn skills and meet people.
- The key living in the changed system is a network of support
- So not just food growers but cooks, chefs, preservers.
- If we do this, remember Bill Mollison recommended we just needed ten percent of us to move from consumption to production to fix most of the world’s problems, so if we do this or rather when we’ll be turning every piece of land from a fossil fuel consuming vacuum and waste production area into a food producing, biodiversity promoting carbon sink.
- We can fix this. Things will never be the same as they were but they weren’t going to be anyway.
- Grasp the change, direct it lovingly and bring others with us.
All we have to do is:
Decarbonise the air, recarbonise the soil!
And if your interested in joining others to make this change happen, it’s the focus of our online conference: RegenEarth 2019: Living Soils. This year’s theme is backyard Regen. Over 300 years of accumulated knowledge and experiences over three night’s presentation all for just $67 AUD. There are links in the show notes.
Thank you for listening and I’ll be back next week.
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LINKS
The RegenEarth 2019 Online Conference ~ Living Soil
Facebook Page: World Organic News Facebook page.
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