Kristine Hammel’s Amaranth trail at Persephone Market Garden
The Earth as we observe it was shaped by the living world. The world around us is full of living creatures – microscopic bacteria and fungi, tiny algae, plants of all forms and sizes, insects and worms, bigger creatures like birds, amphibians, reptiles, and mammals including us humans. All living creatures utilize our Earth’s gases, its water, nutrients, minerals, the carbon, and other inanimate matters. Creatures absorb and transform energy from the sun: plants turn water into vapour and make sugars from oxygen, while animals and fungi make carbon dioxide from sugars [1]. Plants even exude little particles into the air that help cloud formation and create rain. At large scale, the living world can transform deserts into rain forests [2], it can turn off the heat domes that develop over dust or asphalt. By shifting the energy balance of our atmosphere, the living world can moderate storms into breezes and regulate the water cycle [3]. The living world creates a climate that is conducive to more life [4]. In fact, there would be no oxygen in our atmosphere without the living world; there would be neither iron ores nor fossil fuel.
Yet, the living world can only be fathomed in the interactions between creatures. We humans live because our gut microbes turn food into nutrients. Cows and sheep live because the grass they eat is converted into nutritious food by their ruminant microbes. Plants live in tight symbiosis with soil fungi and myriad of other soil organisms that provide micro-nutrients and foster their immunity. Pollinators live by fertilizing the flowers that sustain them. Birds live by dispersing seeds that become new plants, now coated in fertility (birdshit, so to speak). In grasslands, pack predators foster soil health by keeping herbivores in tight herds… creatures of the living world cannot exist in solitude, they are always embedded in myriads of relationships. Like in a healthy economy or a vibrant community, every creature is embedded in reciprocity; creatures are interdependent with other creatures. No being is an island entire of itself – every being is a part of the main and adds itself to divine creation.
Landscapes were once mosaics of diversity in permanent transition from one state to another, disturbed by fires or large mammals, recovering, in successions from simpler relationship toward ever-more connectedness. As patchwork of succession levels, species diversity increases as does the level of interdependence between species. Alongside, the cycling of water and nutrient increases: nutrients are used multiple times and kept on the land, water is transpired and rained back to the surface again and again. Like a healthy economy is characterized by high velocity of circulation of money, a healthy landscape reuses matter and energy. The living world possesses an internal force that drives it toward ever-renewing diversified balance – scholars across all religions see the divine in this force toward health and resilience.
Almost every book I read to my children talks about these living creatures and their relationships – the tigers, frogs, dolphins and rhinos… they are part of our identity as humans. We mirror ourselves in this living world; the divine speaks to us through creation. Yet, compared to my childhood – I am now 47 years old – the living world has diminished dramatically. Where there were big swarms of butterflies and swallows, all too often springs became silent. The living world is abandoning us – many birds have disappeared entirely, most others are diminished. There are no longer large ruminant herds roaming the plains, the rain forests are going. As soils are degraded, the land no longer can absorb and hold water – water runs off, taking with it the remnant topsoil. Drainage and waterworks further accelerates the drying of our lands. Bare soil heats up rapidly, creating heat domes in urban and rural areas – rainfall diminishes, landscapes dry up. I fear that my grandchildren will no longer experience the wilderness that I grew up in, they will no longer find peace in the divine that has manifested itself through creation. What is driving this disappearance of the living world? I would like to offer a single driver: landscape simplification by humans. Landscape simplification reverses this divine force of the living world.
Landscape simplification reduces the number of species in a landscape, the number of transitions from one succession state to another. It reduces the relationships between species and the cycling of matter by living species. If water hits the ground in a degraded landscape, whatever is not evaporated directly will runs off at the surface disappears toward the ocean, taking nutrients with it. The cooling power of plant transpiration no longer protects the Earth’s surface – anyone who has walked from open asphalt to a shade canopy to a living tree can feel the power of transpiration – the coolness of the tree compared to the shade canopy. About half of the world’s rainfall is recycled from plant transpiration! We simplify landscapes in a myriad of manners – by converting our yards into turf lawns that we keep tediously short, bushes into parking lots and roads, wetlands and forests into fields. By removing hedgerows and leveling uneven ground, by draining our landscapes and straightening our rivers. We simplify the species in our soil by removing the fungi with fungicides, the earth microbes with tillage, the weeds with herbicides, the insects with insecticides, the rodents with rodenticides – and the birds disappear because they have nothing left to eat. Single species dominate such simplified landscapes – a crop, turf grass, a plantation tree. These isolated species are no longer embedded into reciprocal relationships with soil organisms, other plants or animals. Because complex relationships stabilize living systems, simplified systems remain fragile and rely on permanent intervention by us humans. We became the lords who form our own creation with our knowledge and technology.
Landscape simplification brings many benefits: we can use large modern machinery; we can standardize workflow, hire contractors, and produce at unprecedented scale. With fewer farmers than ever! Our creation is simplified to the level where we can understand it and gain full control – we mow and fertilize, we irrigate and drain, we remove the trouble makers, and fine-tune how we feed our plants and animals with lots of technical innovation. But with simplification, we also take the living world’s ability to self-regulate, to express itself fully and generate the diverse nutrition gives our body’s health. North Americans were never as unhealthy as today despite eating sufficient calories. And as the landscape’s ability to self-regulate its micro climate has collapsed in many regions, and global warming is adding heat and energy into the atmosphere, we suddenly feel out of our control. Nature seems to turn against us.
Increasingly, climate change is hurting us farmers – drought, excessive rain, erosion, storms and hails have become a permanent stress factor that is hard to manage. And this stress is leaving its mark: Award-winning farmer psychotherapist Deborah Vanberkel reports how farmers’ mental health suffers from “nature waging war against farming” – and how farmers are pondering to defend themselves in this war, and to fight back [5]!
I would like to offer a narrative that uses a different metaphor than war. Maybe nature is not waging war – maybe nature is simply unable to give us the same level of nurturing, of care, as it used to. If nature is a nurturing mom, maybe its mammal glands have run dry. If nature is a tree that offers its fruits generously, maybe this tree is sick at its roots and no longer has the energy to bear fruits. If nature is a mother that feeds its family, maybe the woman is tired after nights without sleep. Of course, we may choose to interpret these weaknesses as acts of aggression. We may fight what we perceive as aggression, demanding more milk, more fruits, more cooking – our toddler does it all the time. But is our metaphor of war really helpful here?
An increasing number of young farmers are embracing “farming with the living world” as a new type of challenge. Our premise is that we want to farm in ways that simultaneously foster a vibrant living world, produce healthy food crops, and create a financially viable and spiritually enriching livelihood for us farmers. We farm based on the regenerative soil health principles, we learn from agroecological insights and the experience of our ancestors. We orchestrate the living world on our land – and are happy to find earthworms, frogs, toads, snakes, and ample other creatures amidst our crops. We are also happy that the flavor of our crops is outstanding, and our customers remark how this food makes them feel healthy and energetic, how this food re-balances their disturbed guts.
On our farm, we are also finding a new ally in our new role as caretakers: locally, the living world is beginning to recover its vibrancy, its complexity, its inter-relatedness, its balance. The divine force of creation works for us – it is starting to self-regulate and foster a context that fosters our crops. This year was very dry – recovering soil health has given our field the ability to absorb the little rain that fell, store it near the plant roots, and provide it for growth. Pest pressure is diminishing – crop plants are better expressing their defense mechanisms and predators are increasing in abundance. Since we stopped tilling entirely, we see ground-dwelling native pollinators abound. Our field is now full of frogs, snakes, toads, and other hunters!
At home, our farming attempts are at small scale. Our new paradigm offers ample challenges that we are learning our way through. We have learned that we cannot control these; we can only nurture the living world. At times, things go wrong – and we had to throw labor at it to fix it. But we are learning preventative strategies that are far easier – using specific strategies and timing, equipment, inputs, row cover, cover crops or companion plants. It feels like parenting our land with all its living creatures: the child sometimes misbehaves and we are unable to control that child’s behavior. We can only improve how we nudge it along, how we address unmet needs, how we cuddle the land or, at times, disturb it intentionally. We are beginning to feel more comfortable in our new role: we are no longer seeking full control because we respect the inert dynamics of the living world – we are enabling, supporting or discouraging with a thousand little hammers. Things take time, but the direction remains encouraging –seeing the living creation unfolding gives us joy. As diversity is enhancing and relationships are complexifying, the farm expresses a new level of resilience. And as our climate is weirdening, this living world is acting as our ally – at least within the microcosm of our farm. Regenerating the living world gives us hope, or at least a spiritual grounding.
[1] Didi Pershouse, Other Species are Essential Workers, Whose Economies Enfold Our Own. Medium, Dec 2020. Download
[3] Pielke Sr RA, Peters DP, Niyogi D. Ecology and Climate of the Earth—The Same Biogeophysical System. Climate. 2022 Feb 14;10(2):25.
[4] Lovelock, James. “Gaia: the living Earth.” Nature 426, no. 6968 (2003): 769-770.
[5] https://gfo.ca/podcasts/graintalk-episode-47-deborah-vanberkel-and-markus-haerle/
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