A new documentary tells the story why ecological farming is the best response to the climate crisis

A new documentary will be premiering in October 2023, titled “Regenerating Life – How to cool the planet, feed the world, and live happily ever after”. The film tells the story about the role of life in regulating the Earth’s  climate – and how we have forgotten to look at life as we have lost sight of Earth’s wholeness. Carbon dioxide and the greenhouse effect are important in reflecting heat back to the ground. Yet, our destruction of the living world creates a ground surface that radiates much more heat upward and “supercharges” the greenhouse’s reflection – something that is almost utterly missing from our global and political consciousness.

Film director John Feldman had already portrayed  the amazing system thinker and scientist Lynn Margulis, whose groundbreaking work includes a new understanding of life in general, a re-writing of the tree of evolution, symbiogenesis as driving force of evolutionary innovation. Her doctoral thesis first described endosymbiosis, the bacterial origins of mitochondria; among many other fundamental breakthroughs, she later provided the scientific footing of the Gaia hypothesis – the idea that planet Earth’s living biosphere is regulating the flow of water, nutrients, heat, and most importantly our climate. This new documentary is a natural next step in Feldman’s curiosity for the planet: what is the role of the living biosphere in today’s climate crisis?

The film is subdivided into three parts that emerged from John Feldman’s inquiries. First, he summarizes how the living biosphere regulates the climate – the impacts on the water cycle and the flows of energy. Feldman spent weeks working with Walter Jehne, a German-Australian scientist who coined the concept of the “soil sponge”. Jehne explains that 95% of energy flows are actually driven by water (or the absence thereof), and how the living world actively shapes these water and energy flows while creating perfect conditions for the thriving of life. John’s story fundamentally deviates from the story that IPCC is telling, The latter centers global warming around human-caused greenhouse gas emissions, whereas biological climate feedbacks are explicitly excluded from the IPCC’s analysis by its political mandate and scope. And yet, the breakdown of these biological feedbacks seem to drive many of the changes that meteorologists are observing today. The first part of the film describes global warming as an outcome of human eradication of the living biosphere, which the greenhouse effect is accelerating but not causing. The second part of the documentary continues to elaborate how humans can resuscitate the living biosphere – ecological restoration, landscape regeneration, and the the new water paradigm. The third part explores agriculture as the main driver of landscape change, which has degraded much of this Earth’s surface – yet also has the biggest regeneration potential of land!

John Feldman, in email conversations, struggled with telling the story of how humans are disrupting life’s moderating regulation of the climate system. He wanted to also show a way out of this crisis, as he saw it emerging in micro pockets around the world. But he did not want to tell this story in a simplistic manner – he identifies reductionism is the cause of our skewed perception of Earth, our inability to see life in its full beauty. So he deep dives into ecosystem restoration and food systems, and connects the complexities that are real barriers to change  – covering colonialism, corporatism and modern greed. He explores it all  – regenerative grazing, Vandana Shiva’s work, Soulfire Farm’s take on racism, the industrial-chemical-war complex, the greed monster. And again and again, he returns to Lynn Margulis whom he regards as the “mother” of a Western understanding of the symbiotic biosphere. Feldman takes a clear stance against a reductionist “carbon dioxide” narrative, and warns against disastrous consequences of carbon-focused policies that ignore the biosphere.

The film deeply moved me. It is the first documentary that truly explains why I was drawn to ecological farming, as the logical consequence of my understanding of the Earth System in the Anthropocene. I believe that every ecological farmer should watch it, and promote it widely with their networks and with their customers.

I believe that the film’s length, the density of its content, and the fundamental shifts in paradigm pose a serious challenge to audiences who are not trained to think about complex systems. The first two parts offer radical shifts in paradigm in how we see Earth and ourselves in it. This requires some time to digest. The third part radically unravels our food system, in ways that conventional farmers will find difficult to accept. If you organize viewings, I recommend breaking them up and taking ample breaks – optimally with a Q&A with someone who understands the climate science of the living world, and room for reflection of one’s own biases. Otherwise, the emotionally moving messages of last part may over-write the fundamental revelations of the earlier parts – people are defensive about their old narratives, even if facts prove them wrong or outdated. And the first two parts offer the basis for our understanding of Earth, its climate, the living world that shapes it all, and humanity’s pressing task to grow spiritually and embrace our role as stewards.

For this blog series, I would like to start by sharing some of my personal history and experience.

Why is the Margulisian revolution still such a well-kept secret? Some tales from personal experience

Feldman’s documentary mainly hinges around a new understanding of what drives climate change – we may call it the “two legs of human-driven climate change”: The first leg is how landuse/vegetation/water dynamics move energy flow upward by locking energy in water (“vegetation-driven hydrological cooling”), the second leg is how atmospheric gases reflect heat radiation downward (“greenhouse effect”). Far more seems to be going on than “just” the insulating greenhouse gas blanket – we also have to concern ourselves with the heat furnace of “land degradation”!

In a past blog, I listed the four main energetic drivers of Earth’s climate: natural variability and the chaos machine; variations in the Earth’s axis around the sun and fluctuations of sun’s radiation itself; changes in the biosphere that impact the Earth’s internal material and energy flows (climate self-regulation by living landscapes); and the gas composition of the atmosphere (the greenhouse effect). These four drivers of climate continue today, even though climate change now almost exclusively refers to the last of these four.

Until the mid 2000s, it remained difficult to attribute observed climate changes between these four drivers. The complex interactions especially obscured causal attribution of human climate impacts, as we modified the atmosphere and land cover (e.g. [1]). Until 2003, the search for proof for the greenhouse effect in observation data remained the search for the “greenhouse needle” in a “landuse haystack” of observation data. This was exactly the time when I worked as climate researcher, before I got interested in food systems. So I would like to share some own observations how climate science developed.

I studied a master in Earth System Sciences with a focus on the oceans. The course was designed by Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, who became one of the biggest names in climate science and a founding visionary of the IPCC. We studied Gaia’s climate feedbacks intensively, and life’s visionary Lynn Margulis was a regular visiting professor to our little institute. During an internship with GTZ (now GIZ), I had the opprotunity to share some of these insights with policy makers, and was invited to travel to COP7 in Marrakesh with members of the German climate negotiation delegation. This gave me some relevant insights into the political dimension of climate change, in particular how and why political priorities were chosen. Later, I wrote my master thesis with Schellnhuber’s group for Earth System Analysis at Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK), and continued working as a researcher with them. Our group coined the “tipping points” and “Earth System Analysis”, made fundamental contributions to the planetary boundary concept, and to both in the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (MEA) and the IPCC. My late supervisor oversaw the landuse scenarios group at MEA ([2]) – in short, biodiversity, landuse and the greenhouse were seen as interrelated processes within the same Earth System.

It was an interesting era:  The greenhouse effect was a century-old postulate, a theory that remained yet unproven. The first “statistical proof” of the greenhouse, which clearly separated the global greenhouse effect from human landuse changes in observation data, was only delivered in late 2003. Biological and landuse-driven impacts on the climate were not disputed – following standardized guidelines (e.g. WMO 2003,[3]), scientists routinely “corrected” climate station measurements to data ‘drifts’ that stemmed from landuse change. Most climate stations across the world showed a warming trend from urbanization – and around the globe, cities had sprawled around climate observation stations and imposed their urban heat islands onto climate measurements. I remember an eerie celebratory reception at PIK, after an “officially accepted” proof was delivered that the greenhouse effect is real – using global data on shrinking glaciers. We were both proud and relieved that the search for proof was finally over. And sick in our stomachs that our concern is real.

Still, many academics had very good arguments that the greenhouse gas effect was overrated, pointing at landuse as main driver of Earth System change. Of course, fossil fuel lobbyists thrived on such confusion, as it hindered political progress and sowed doubt. Looking back in today’s political realities, where corporations strategically seed doubt about everything to stall collective action and defend the greedy interests of their shareholders, it remains inconceivable to me how governments of the world came together in 1992 in Rio De Janeiro and declared their intention to take action, and again in Kyoto in 1996. The greenhouse effect was still an unproven theory! There was far more political resistance to addressing the negative impacts of landuse change – this would have interfered with national zoning and land development policies, and with industrial agriculture. So the United Nations only address landuse change in the drylands of the Global South, under the Convention to Combat Desertification (CCD), and political attention remains turned down to a simmer until today. Temperate soils and food supply are still not considered as a planetary boundary ([4]).

Like many peers, I never managed to find a footing at this intersection of climate and landuse – neither in Academia, nor in advocacy groups that demanded (over)simplistic messaging. Once we found the greenhouse needle in the landuse haystack of warming, it seems we wanted to forget all about that messy haystack. The “living leg” of climate remained a no-go topic as humanity put all bets on greenhouse gas action, rallying behind false certainty. I am deeply grateful to John Feldman to revisiting this history – it is the basis for a more wholesome understanding of Earth, its climate, the living world, and our role as humans amidst all of it.

In the second blog, I will reflect on the reasons why, in my observation, the climate debate has become one-legged and lost the connection to the land.

[1] Kalnay E, Cai M. Impact of urbanization and land-use change on climate. Nature. 2003 May 29;423(6939):528-31.

[2] Bennett E, Carpenter S, Cork S, Peterson G, Petschel-Held G, Ribeiro T, Zurek M. Scenarios for ecosystem services: rationale and overview. Ecosystems and human well-being: scenarios. 2005 Dec 14;2.

[3] Aguilar E, Auer I, Brunet M, Peterson TC, Wieringa J. Guidelines on climate metadata and homogenization. WCDMP-53. WMO/TD-1186; 2003.

[4] Kraamwinkel CT, Beaulieu A, Dias T, Howison RA. Planetary limits to soil degradation. Communications Earth & Environment. 2021 Dec 8;2(1):249.