Let’s chose a “Biosphere regeneration” diet, not a “Climatarian” diet!

Dear Matt Galloway,

Your fantastic segment on individual options and responsibilities to address climate change (here) gave voice to a broad spectrum of perspectives and approaches. Throughout the entire episode, “climate action” is being equated to “reducing GHG emissions” – through our personal choices in home and transport, financial investments, and our diet. My concern is that we should not reduce our approach to tackle the planetary crisis to “carbon capitalism”, as our main “weapon” in our “fight against climate change”. In fact, this very framing of our crisis as a “fight against carbon” would lead to unintended, disastrous consequences for our biosphere, consequences that I fear more than global warming itself (have we won a single “war” … against drugs, terrorism, obesity, vaccination hesitancy, or any environmental objective?). Instead, we need to shift from “fighting climate change” to “caring for our Earth”.

We need to start regenerating our biosphere, while also transitioning our technologies and lifestyles to reduce our personal footprints. And there are many options to do that.

WHO AM I?

My wife and I are small ecological farmers in Grey County, Ontario and operate Persephone Market Garden. My academic and professional background has always had a climate change lens. As young professional, in the year 2001 I participated in COP-7 in Marrakesh. Since then, I have worked around adaptation and resilience, watershed management and agriculture – always from a climate lens. For ten years now, we learn how to build healthy food systems in farming, distributing, and eating. As biosphere-oriented or “regenerative” farmer, our focus is not the storage of carbon, but a landscape with the ability to produce food while building climate-resilient water & nutrient cycles and creating complex living communities of plants, animals and microbes – both domesticated and wild. I believe that such a biodiverse food landscape would have more climate benefits than a narrow “carbon sequestration monoculture landscape” that is efficient from the narrow carbon capitalism lens. I am basing my “story” on solid science, there’s no time for more conspiracy.

FARMING WITH THE BIOSPHERE – FOR A “PRO BIOSPHERE DIET”

My wife and I are learning to farm for the biosphere, and eat with the biosphere. GHG savings are only one amongst many considerations for us. We consider the cycling of water, the cycling of minerals, the health of our biological communities, biodiversity, the effectiveness of how our land converts solar energy into biological matter and removes carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. But also the way how fungi and microbially rich soils cycle this carbon back into the air – decomposition is part of the ever-renewing cycle of life and death. The biosphere becomes more productive when carbon cycles faster – in a similar way as our economy benefits from high velocity of money circulation. As farmers, we benefit from a continuously increasing productivity while our input costs are continuously falling. This is good for sustained profitability, and worth the effort to get there. At least for us.

In today’s world, farm animals are mostly separated from their feeder plants: most farm animals are taken from the land and put into boxes. In our dominant production system, nutrient cycles are disrupted because feed crops grow far from animal excrement. When growing feed in Southwestern Ontario, much of our farmland exposes naked dirt for nine months of the year, while only three months see green plant cover – June to September, when urbanites happen to travel and build their image of rural landscapes. On average, Southwestern Ontario’s landscape achieves only 50% of its photosynthetic potential because crop fields remain fallow for so long [1]. This drives soil erosion and flooding, leaks nutrients into our drinking water and lakes, kills fish in our brownish rivers and leaves no habitat where insects or birds could survive. And even if ruminants remain on the land, grazing practices often lead to land degradation by overgrazing (pastures look like “lawn with thistles”).  Agriculture has created such a production system to maximize immediate profits, while not monetizing “external” costs for the environment, our landscape, our health, and our children and grandchildren.

We need to recognize and accept that the negative outcomes of modern animal agriculture are not the fault of animals. These outcomes are mainly a result of our decision to separate animals from the land and take them out of their natural cycles, or graze without proper animal movement and pasture rests. Yet, in a healthy biosphere, animals contribute essential ecological functions: they digest plant matter and quickly return nutrients back to the soil for fast regrowth and without causing pollution problems [watch movie “Livestock on the land”, [2]]. Regenerative farmers are learning to mimic this state of natural balance, a landscape that cycles water and nutrients and carbon rapidly. Animals are an essential component of vibrant biological systems – ecological farmers need ruminants because these can “up-cycle” grasses and other cold-season cover crops, and perform invaluable ecosystem functions on the land.  And certainly, such systems store substantially more carbon than mainstream “average” production practices with their degraded soils and shortened growing period.

Farmers don’t need much for farming regeneratively: we need long-term access to land, a knowledge-sharing community, seeds for our plants, animals, and eaters who enable our innovation. By realizing a “biosphere diet” that contains seasonal and regeneratively grown plants and animals wherever accessible.

So I pledge to all listeners that we don’t vilify farm animals per se as culprits of environmental destruction. Instead, we need to take a close look at HOW we farm, and foster those production systems that revitalize natural cycles. We need to find systems that convert the full potential of solar energy while fostering biodiversity. We need faith in nature and in our human ingenuity to find symbiotic farming methods. Yes, I know that we could do this here in Ontario! And we need to find financial mechanisms that allow more regenerative farming such that we transform our landscapes: in the short run, that is less profitable than industrial farming. But it brings mostly positive externalities for our society. Today, short-sighted rent seeking behaviour mainly pushes financial investment into farmland re-zoning for urban development, which uses industrial farming as short-term “bridging activity” that saves property taxes while speculators are waiting for rezoning. We need to reverse this trend. Large-scale biosphere regeneration would buy humankind the time that we need to overcome our addiction to fossil fuels, with technological and lifestyle transitions.

This seems unlikely to you today? Imagine the year 2005: we could have dismissed “electric cars” because “the typical car” has a large environmental footprint – and electric cars are still cars, right? Well, electric cars are not “typical” cars – just like regenerative livestock is not “average” livestock and has a different environmental footprint. Back in 2005, electric vehicles was a negligible market segment, like ecological farming in Ontario is today. Within only 15 years, electric car and bike technology is maturing and at the verge of becoming mainstream! I am confident that we can produce more food on less land, in ways that heal our landscape and build climate resilience and sequester carbon. Based on our daily observation on our own farm, and globally emerging research in landscape regeneration.

But we need urban support.  We cannot do this with a “climatarian diet” that is based on national average impact measurements of commodity foods. Such diet would just convert more wilderness into carbon monocultures. We need to go deeper, care more, sharpen our senses, and choose a “biosphere regeneration diet” – foods that grew by strengthening nature’s cycles. And we need to address speculative land purchases for re-zoning, which push land into cash cropping as interim stream for moderate profits and tax savings. We need strong allies from the urban population!

Keep up your excellent work, I am a big fan of your show.

Yours, Thorsten Arnold

Further reading:

The Guardian, Love meat too much for Veganuary? Try Regenuary instead

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[1] Hengl T, Walsh MG, Sanderman J, Wheeler I, Harrison SP, Prentice IC. Global mapping of potential natural vegetation: an assessment of machine learning algorithms for estimating land potential. PeerJ. 2018 Aug 22;6:e5457.

Open access here: https://peerj.com/articles/5457/

[2] Livestock on the land, free on youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4xBDr_a1C2s