At a time when the world faces multiple intersectional crises, movements towards regenerative solutions offer opportunities for systemic change. The upheaval of the last year revealed the depth of social inequities, especially in the United States, where a capitalistic system puts profits ahead of people, creating ripple effects around the globe.
Amid these crises, more companies and organizations are seeing the need to take the lead and do their part to ensure a healthy planet for the future by addressing social and environmental systemic flaws. Shifting to regenerative farming principles and practices brings a host of environmental and social benefits that restore our connections and relationships with nature and reshape our systems to better serve all people. Addressing a history of colonialism can restore independence and power in communities.
Alexis Bunten, PhD, who is the Co-Director of the Indigeneity Program at the three-decade-old non-profit organization Bioneers, says understanding decolonization first requires an understanding of the historical systems of power and oppression. “That’s a settler-colonial context in the case of the U.S.,” she says. “Those systems of oppression through colonial capitalism have affected the ways that we live our day-to-day lives to our detriment, and not just us as Native people, but to every American’s detriment.”
For businesses and other organizations, decolonization can involve a spectrum of actions, Bunten says, from breaking down vertical hierarchies to recognize and honor the talents and contributions of each individual, no matter their job title or standing, to valuing quality over quantity through practices that encourage worker engagement, collaborative partnerships, and community benefit.
In these and other ways, businesses and organizations can begin to address systemic colonization and adopt regenerative practices and policies, while shaping new systems that work for all people and for the planet’s future — and encourage others to do the same.
The Business Approach to Regeneration and Decolonization
Among the companies that have incorporated regeneration and decolonization efforts into their business model and mission is Guayakí, a California-based business that imports organic yerba mate from South America for its beverages. Through its relationships with farmers and others in Indigenous communities in Paraguay, Argentina, and Brazil, where the yerba mate used in Guayakí’s products is grown, Guayakí (a Bioneers sponsor) helps ensure families living there can resist the pressure of surrounding deforestation and stay on their land.
Guayakí Co-Founder Alex Pryor says these “horizontal” relationships reflect the regenerative, collaborative traditions of Guayakí’s suppliers.
“What facilitates the dialogue is the traditional way of drinking yerba mate through the gourd and how that’s shared with each individual in the circle. It’s an ancestral ceremony that comes from the Guarani,” Pryor says. “Anything that you consume has a profound effect on you, particularly a plant that is considered a mother plant. When we work with the communities, we use that same principle — that the yerba mate plant spirit embodies when we drink it in ourselves, and in our communities, and in our relationships.”
By celebrating and honoring the long-held values of its supplier communities — including the sharing of yerba mate in a gourd as a sign of friendship and the conservation of rainforest in Paraguay — Pryor says Guayakí brings the spirit of yerba mate to its customers and other stakeholders while using storytelling to spread the word about the importance of soil health and the value of the Atlantic Forest. In addition to celebrating supplier communities, Guayakí’s four pillars of regeneration include partnering with our values, taking responsibility for our environmental footprint, practicing conscious leadership, and celebrating communities and cultures.
“The yerba mate is a tree that grows in the subtropical rainforest together with a diverse group of plants and animals and other things too, so that’s why I say we represent the plant,” he says.
As a Certified B Corporation, Guayakí operates as part of a community of businesses that value customers, workers, community, and environment, and pursue an economy that works for all. Pryor says that pursuit of environmental and societal improvement also is part of regenerative practices that emphasize “living the question.” For us to determine that we are going on the right path is allowing the questions to be part of the dialogue.”
Over the last year, many businesses and people had no choice but to become comfortable with uncertainty and change during the pandemic. After 25 years in business, he says Guayakí continues to grow its bottom line while realizing the dynamic nature of business and its role in encouraging systemic change.
“The challenge also becomes how to keep this regenerative spirit in people’s minds and hearts, and in its own ecosystem that surrounds them,” he says. Changing the economic system to incorporate regenerative practices and address societal issues like decolonization means others can follow Guayakí’s lead and be willing to “live the question” by seeking new and diverse voices to guide their work, Pryor says.
The Systemic Approach to Regeneration and Decolonization
Transforming capitalism to reveal and eliminate injustices in our economic system will require businesses to abandon some long-held practices and collaborate with an eye on inclusion and social justice, according to Andy Fyfe, Growth Catalyst for B Lab, the nonprofit that oversees the B Corp community.
“It’s imperative that businesses take a lead — and it may not be comfortable. Business leaders need to step up for what’s right until policy can keep up,” Fyfe says. “The rule and cultural norm of businesses only focused on maximizing profit needs to change. To create economic systems change and move toward decolonization, we need legislative and regulatory change. We need policy that requires companies and investors to adopt what we call benefit corporation governance and consider their impact on all people and the planet.”
B Corps take on the responsibility of considering impact on stakeholders and lead by examples in areas like climate justice, Fyfe says, which includes practices like decolonization and regeneration that Guayakí has incorporated into its operations, as well as business policies and structures that move away from vertical hierarchies and cultivate open communication. Other B Corps leading in climate justice include Patagonia, an outdoor apparel company that provides funding for grassroots organizations, advances sustainability practices in its industries, and advocates for policy change; and Pukka Herbs, producer of organic herbal teas and well-being supplements, which promotes a community approach to share tools, expertise, and training; supports environmental and social initiatives; and has adopted regenerative agriculture practices.
“For businesses to start toward decolonization, there needs to be a collective unlearning,” Fyfe says. “If we better embraced the unknown and held ourselves to listen, we’d have more credible voices at the table.”
Organizations that honor the voices and contributions of every individual — from the grocery store bagger to the buyer to the marketing manager, for example — are following common tribal practices and encouraging more resilient systems, says Bioneers’ Alexis Bunten, PhD. By valuing quality over quantity and seeing success through more than the bottom line, organizations also can shift toward more inclusive practices that strengthen capacity and empower workers.
“If you listen to everybody from their vantage point and their experience, you’re going to get an array of solutions to organizational problems,” she says. “Having a culture of communication in your organization is what we call a ‘brave space.’’’
Conversations about decolonization can be provocative, she says, but are important and necessary at any institution or establishment built to succeed on a system of white supremacy, she says.
“We need to recognize that there is an inherent power and balance, and if we are having cross-cultural, cross-racial discussions, to get ready to be uncomfortable if you want to hear the truth,” Bunten says. “You need to hear the truth in order to reconcile, to communicate, to build stronger relationships. Ultimately, for organizations, that strengthens their capacity.”
Decolonizing Your Organization: How to Start
While adopting regenerative practices that encourage decolonization can be daunting for businesses and other organizations, even a small start can make a difference. “There are steps you can take to decolonize, and in some cases re-Indigenize, the way that we live our lives so that we’re healthier, happier, and society works better,” says Alexis Bunten, Bioneers Indigeneity Program Co-Director. She shared a few recommendations:
Learn whose land your organization is on by checking this online resource, Bunten says. “Then learn how to acknowledge those peoples. Make relationships with them in the area.”
Reconsider your company’s structure. “One example of a way organizations uphold colonial capitalism is through strict vertical hierarchies,” Bunten says. “Set up an organization that honors every different person laterally.” This better recognizes each person’s unique talents and encourages broader discussions that will generate new solutions to organizational problems.
Value quality over quantity. Incorporate metrics around the quality of your products, worker experience, relationships with other organizations — measures that go beyond profit to incorporate people and planet.
Pursue local options, such as food decolonization, by making healthy food options more accessible to people in your community.
Advance the land back movement by respecting Indigenous rights and improving access to affordable housing and sustainable food.
In a 2014 panel for The New School in New York City, bell hooks reframed queerness as “not as being about who you’re having sex with” but “as being about the self that is at odds with everything around it and has to invent and create and find a place to speak and to thrive and to live.”
The erasure of queer identities and the imposition of Western categories of gender and sexuality have been critical to the function of white supremacy throughout history. But courageous queer leadership has risen to lead us toward a decolonized future and force a reckoning with this legacy of exploitation.
Queer leadership has been critical in progressive social, environmental, and political movements. In the spirit of the ways queer people must learn to invent and create space through which to love, queerness teaches us to innovate toward a future in which we can thrive.
This week, we share wisdom from queer people leading the way to healing and building a regenerative future.
This article contains the content from the 2/01/2021 Bioneers Pulse newsletter. Sign up here to get the newsletter straight to your inbox!
Lessons of Resilience from Queer Movements for Liberation
It is essential for environmental justice leaders to understand how the oppression of queer communities and climate change are connected. Vanessa Raditz from the Queer Ecojustice Project offers insights into the many forms of queer resilience, uplifting the resistance, visibility and power of LGBTQ+ people in movements for justice, care and liberation.
The Queer-Led Groups Modeling a New Form of Land Access
Queer Black and Indigenous agricultural leaders are paving the way for a regenerative economy rooted in care and racial justice can proactively address issues like climate change and housing inequality. Originally published in Yes! Magazine, explore this article to learn about queer leadership and transformative justice.
Community Conversations: Climate, Justice, Indigenous Actions & Trauma – JULY 8
Join Eriel Deranger, climate justice leader and executive director of Indigenous Climate Action, in this community conversation about climate justice, Indigenous action & healing from trauma on July 8th. Community Conversations are a new offering from Bioneers that will be offered monthly and give people a space to connect with others and explore ideas inspired by the Bioneers community.
Gender Inclusivity and the Importance of Community Support
“Everybody comes to their own awareness of themselves in different ways, some very quickly, maybe early, some over a long period of time. I’m the kind of slow learner that way. It took me a long time to sort of figure out who I was. But it’s okay. We’re all individuals, and that’s one of the beauties of what we can do in the LGBTQIA+ community is recognize the differences, but the similarities, that we’re all trying to be ourselves and authentically so.”
In this Q&A with three queer thought leaders, explore questions about navigating radical inclusion, gender, and sexuality.
Women, Diversity, and Sexual Minorities in the Psychedelic Community
People of Color, Women, and the LGBTQ+ community are immensely underrepresented in the psychedelic conclave. Not only has the contributions of women to the field been downplayed, but the abuse of women in underground psychedelic circles has become a serious problem. In this panel, leaders at the cutting-edge of inclusivity advocacy in the psychedelic community share their perspectives.
The irony behind the “coming-out-of-nowhere” narrative surrounding new artists is made abundantly clear for Native writers whose work reflects and is shaped by American history and colonialism. This narrative erases the history and systems that shape the work of contemporary Native artists. Even after establishing oneself as a modern artist, Native writers are pressured to create work that is more of a relic of the past rather than a testament of presence. Having been denied both a past and a present, Native artists find themselves victim to a colonial gaze that denotes them to be mere tour guides into the exotic rather than worldmakers themselves.
Tommy Orange, a citizen of the Cheyenne and Arapaho Nations, is a novelist and writer born and raised in Oakland, California, who has turned these tired tropes on their heads, telling a gripping story of the contemporary Native experience that both acknowledges a brutal colonial history while pointing towards a pathway. His bestselling debut novel There There was a Pulitzer Prize finalist and won the prestigious American Book Award.
In this article, Tommy Orange details the journey of becoming a published author and how being a Native artist has shaped that experience.
This is an edited, excerpt transcript from a Bioneers 2020 Conference workshop called “The Power of Words: Indigenous Writers Workshop”.
I sort of came to writing fiction and prose and literature, whatever you want to call it, through a kind of back door. I didn’t study it in school at all. I really came to it on my own terms. I read a lot of works in translation as a sort of entry point, and I was doing a lot of experimental writing at the beginning of exploring what it would mean for me to write, but as soon as I started thinking about what it would mean to include myself, my family, and my background, immediately the writing became Native, because I am. Bringing my experience to my writing immediately made it that because, while my my novel is not a piece of autobiographical fiction, there are certainly many elements that come from my, my family’s and my community’s experiences, and I think it’s important for Native People to get more exposure and representation in all the different forms of media that influence our society because our real experiences have largely been made invisible.
I just read that only 5% of books published in the U.S. since 1950 were by people of color, and that’s all people of color—5% during over 70 years of book publishing, so it was never a question for me once I got started how the work would be Native. Even in my MFA program, which was in a Native institution, some fellow Native students in writing workshops would ask “Do these characters have to be Native?” Maybe they were thinking their writing would sell more if the main characters were just in default mode, i.e. an assumption they were white males.
It’s really important for Native people who are getting into media and literature to find ways that we can represent our diverse nations, to think about what it means to include our experience of being a Native person in this world, because it can reach a lot of other Native People, and it’s really important for us to be able to see ourselves represented in these media.
My novel got its start when I was part of a digital storytelling project at the Native American Health Center in Oakland. The people I interviewed there didn’t directly shape the characters in the book, but definitely the experience of being a part of these storytelling circles and helping people—non-storytellers, non-writers—create these digital stories influenced my thinking about the structure of the book and some of its elements. One key lesson was that it was important to get really specific. I was teaching non-writers how to write 300-word scripts that we would turn into three-minute films which would be about a poignant or transformative moment in their lives, and many people’s natural inclination is to hover over or generalize as a way to attempt to connect to other people, but, paradoxically, I found that getting as specific as possible was the best way for their stories to become more universal.
Before I worked at the health center and got into digital storytelling, I was really writing on my own, and I was working in the community. It wasn’t until I got into the MFA program that I really became part of a Native writing community, and that was really transformative for me, but my experience from 2005 to 2013 working at the Native American Health Center doing everything from data entry to grant writing to those digital storytelling projects was definitely formative in helping me think through how I wanted to represent this Oakland Native community in a novelized form.
Native artists of all kinds and Native People in general come up against a unique problem: how do we get the cred as being authentic if we’re not referencing something that’s pre-contact, some kind of ancient tradition. We’re expected to have some kind of ancient traditional tie to authenticate us while also somehow addressing being contemporary people expressing contemporary feelings from contemporary bodies. We grew up in this time, but we’re expected to somehow be connected to 500 years ago and have those two things in a perfect marriage, but nobody else is required to have that when it comes to trying to have an authentic voice. The culture is steeped in stereotypes from the cowboy and Indian era and even the more recent Dances with Wolves era, and the culture is too lazy to want to be inconvenienced about changing its narratives around what a contemporary Native person is.
But I also think we’re at a good moment in American history with more and more people ready to look at what really happened historically. The American consciousness has been holding onto this idea of the noble, fading away mystical Indian, and that’s been a convenient and romanticized version that has been held onto, without wanting to look at all the things that make us complex, because that would include questioning a lot of the foundations of this country and all the lies that are underneath the reasons why it’s so complex to be a contemporary Native person.
There are creative ways to change those old narratives. Here’s a good example from my own life: our son was getting into kindergarten and heading into November, and our fear was what the curriculum regarding Thanksgiving still consists of, especially in public schools. Our first instinct was to just pull him out for Thanksgiving week. We can sort of control it at home, and we’re not going to fight the system and try to change curriculum, because that’s sort of pointless or impossible or at least really exhausting sometimes, but it started not to feel right, so the next year we invited Manny Lieras of the American Indian Child Resource Center who has worked with urban American Indian youth for 15+ years and is a real role model and change agent in the Oakland Intertribal community as well as a singer, drummer and filmmaker, to come to our son’s first-grade classroom.
We didn’t really know what it would look like, but Manny brought his whole family, and it became an amazing episode in which they all danced in the classroom as he sang and drummed. And what was especially cool about it for me was that Manny came in jeans and a T-shirt and a ball cap, and he provided an opportunity for all the kids of “everything you wanted to ask an Indian but were afraid to ask.” And out of the mouths of children came a lot of frankly ignorant questions that of course aren’t their fault. It’s the fault of the system, the curriculum, their parents, popular culture. Some examples were: “Why don’t you live in a tipi? Why do you live in Oakland? What do you do?” And Manny was able to answer in a light and compassionate way, and everyone got to learn, including the adults and the teachers who were in the classroom. It was just an amazing contemporary Native educational opportunity.
I’m asked a lot about how aspiring Native writers can break into the publishing world, but I don’t know how well I can answer it. I was one of these crazy cases where I’d published almost nothing before my book came out. I’d had one story in the Yellow Medicine Review. I’d been looking for years for a Native-specific publication. Red Ink was one of them that I submitted stories to over the years. I’d been submitting pieces since about 2006, and I sold my book in 2017, so there was a lot of rejection and of not hearing anything back in there for over a decade. So even though I “came out of nowhere,” it wasn’t from lack of trying beforehand, or it wasn’t like my first try was a huge success; it was a lot of quiet work and getting used to rejection. Rejection is just the other side of the coin of publication. There really aren’t people that just get published by trying the first time. You have to just keep trying, and then it’s sort of a numbers game. You have to grow the skin to get used to it, and then the sooner you can accept the fact that rejection and publication are the exact same process, it gets a lot easier to keep submitting to places.
Initially I didn’t want to go into an MFA program because I just didn’t trust institutions. I hadn’t done well in school, and I just had a really deep mistrust for doing things that way, but I found out about the Institute of American Indian Arts, and I saw the faculty and the fact that it was a Native organization, and the fact that it was a low residency, which meant I didn’t have to move with my family, and all that sold me on the idea. Then, once I was in the program, I realized that to teach at an MFA, you have to have published a book, which made me realize that I was going to be building relationships with people who have access to the publishing world, and that’s a really good reason to get into an MFA program because you can meet a good number of people who have access and who can help you. And now I’ve helped students through the school. If you have access to the doors, do all you can to widen the doors by helping other people out.
In my case the way I got my book out there was that I was reading at a writing conference and somebody heard me read from There There, and that person happened to have one of the biggest agents in the industry, Aragi, Inc, and introduced me to Nicole Aragi, now my agent. I think that, on top of my previous hard work and the good luck of her hearing me read, and her having that agent, timing played an important role. Standing Rock was happening. This was the end of 2016, and Trump had just been elected (and here we are at the end of that nightmare…). My book went to auction to 14 different publishers right after Trump got in and right after Standing Rock. The timing of all of that really helped my book to get to where it got to. I think that if my book had been out there in 2012 or 2008, I don’t know what would have happened. I think my book’s success had everything to do with the timing of its publication.
So I worked hard, but I got lucky. I had a big agent. The book sold in auction, and because it went to a big publisher, they put a lot of money behind, trying to make sure it rolled out in a way that they could make money off of it, so things got pretty crazy. I’d been traveling all over, and I was shocked when I realized it was actually going to be an “airport” book. I had surreal episodes. I even had a crazy conversation with Sarah Jessica Parker, who wanted to buy the book before it went to auction for an imprint that she was trying to start under Penguin Random House, so because the whole situation was so unusual, there’s no real way for me to give advice on how to get published. I’m not trying to take away from the merit of the book I wrote. I worked really hard on it for six years, and I put a lot of myself and a lot of my experience into it, so I’m happy that it has had popular and critical success, but those sorts of conditions are impossible to predict or duplicate.
So, all I can say is that you have to try all the avenues and hope that something hits. I was trying for 11 years and then something happened after my MFA program. There are certain things you can do and certain situations you can put yourself in, such as attend a KWELI or AWP (Association of Writing Programs) conference. If you’re in a writing program, there are contests you can enter. Whatever publications you see that are publishing other Native writers that you like or that you are aesthetically aligned with, submit there and submit as many times as you can. Try to build up a resumé, and try to find whatever resources you have available in your circles, such as friends who might have agents. Asking doesn’t hurt. A lot of times people will help, if they can. You just have to try all these different avenues. And I think it’s also a really good time to self-publish. A self-published book is not going to get into a curriculum or get into institutions, but with social media and how cheap self-publishing is right now, it’s very affordable right now, more affordable than it’s ever been, and there are self-published books that can have an impact and reach folks in specific communities. If you have something to say, try to find a way to get it out there, because now it’s time for Native writers and artists to tell the real stories about our lives ourselves.
In his book Half-Earth: Our Planet’s Fight for Life, legendary biologist E.O. Wilson challenges humanity: “Only by committing half of the planet’s surface to nature can we hope to save the immensity of life-forms that compose it. Unless humanity learns a great deal more about global biodiversity and moves quickly to protect it, we will soon lose most of the species composing life on Earth. The Half-Earth proposal offers a first, emergency solution commensurate with the magnitude of the problem: By setting aside half the planet in reserve, we can save the living part of the environment and achieve the stabilization required for our own survival.”
Although global biodiversity counts continue to plummet, leading global conservation actors have coalesced around a science-backed policy framework called The Global Deal For Nature, an effort to conserve, protect and restore 30% of the earth’s surface by 2030. At the same time, science is finally beginning to unravel the depths of nature’s complexity – and what they’re uncovering is truly astonishing: a glimpse into the innate wisdom within entire ecosystems. These connected movements, global biodiversity conservation, and the exploration of the wisdom of the wild offer a glimmer of hope as we work towards restoring humanity’s right relationship with our home.
This week, learn from two of the planet’s leading scientists along with a cutting-edge philanthropic institution, all of whom are transforming how we protect and understand our planet.
This article contains the content from the 2/01/2021 Bioneers Pulse newsletter. Sign up here to get the newsletter straight to your inbox!
Finding the Mother Tree
“One of the first clues came while I was tapping into the messages that the trees were relaying back and forth through a cryptic underground fungal network. When I followed the clandestine path of the conversations, I learned that this network is pervasive through the entire forest floor, connecting all the trees in a constellation of tree hubs and fungal links. A crude map revealed, stunningly, that the biggest, oldest timbers are the sources of fungal connections to regenerating seedlings. Not only that, they connect to all neighbors, young and old, serving as the linchpins for a jungle of threads and synapses and nodes. I’ll take you through the journey that revealed the most shocking aspect of this pattern—that it has similarities with our own human brains. In it, the old and young are perceiving, communicating, and responding to one another by emitting chemical signals. Chemicals identical to our own neurotransmitters. Signals created by ions cascading across fungal membranes.”
A Global Deal for Nature: How New Targets for Land Protection & Regeneration Are Transforming Conservation
The Global Deal for Nature is a groundbreaking proposal that calls for a milestone of at least 30% of lands protected by 2030 with an additional 20% in climate stabilization areas. It is also the first global plan to include land, freshwater, and marine ecoregions. Teo Grossman, Senior Director of Programs and Research at Bioneers, interviews Dr. Carly Vynne, one of the proposal’s co-authors, about the ambitious plan and experiences that led her to focusing on natural conservation.
Protecting cultural and biological diversity is central to solving climate change
“It is more important than ever to respect and support the diverse cultures which have helped to preserve these priceless ecosystems. The complex web of life in places like the Amazon have helped to regulate our global climate system for tens of thousands of years, enabling humanity to evolve. But right now, the web is unraveling, with many Indigenous peoples facing growing pressures from extractive industries like mining, drilling, logging, and industrial agriculture.”
Justin Winters, Co-Founder & Executive Director of One Earth, discusses why Indigenous peoples territorial land rights and environmental stewardship take priority in solving climate change.
Conservation, Biodiversity and Innovative Philanthropy | Kris Tompkins, John D. Liu and Marina Silva
Learn about the struggles to preserve some of the last large-scale vibrant ecosystems on Earth, crucial to the diversity of life on our planet, the climate and to our own species’ survival. This discussion was hosted by Atossa Soltani, Founder and Executive Director of Amazon Watch, among the most effective groups in the world conserving the Amazon and its peoples.
Podcast: Got Dirt? Get Soil! Ditch the Plow, Cover Up and Grow Diversity
An agricultural and ecological renaissance is underway to combat the damaging effects of the profit-hungry agribusiness empire. In this episode of Bioneers Radio, learn from biologist Ann Biklé and geologist David Montgomery as they share solutions from nature on regenerative agriculture.
As wild places throughout the world continue to be threatened by human development and climate change, a snowball effect has been created … and it’s growing rapidly. Climate change and its effects create lasting harm and destruction for many plants and animals, while that same loss of biodiversity feeds the flames of climate change. Leading scientists and conservation organizations are transforming our vision for land protection and restoration, from conserving “biodiversity hotspots” towards a global solution that incorporating ambitious but achievable targets for protecting vast swaths of the earth, while investing in restoration and regeneration, now.
Dr. Carly Vynne, a leading wildlife biologist and conservationist, currently Principal Consultant at Osprey Insights and a Strategic Partner at RESOLVE, has worked around the world on major conservation projects for many decades and is one of the co-authors of the groundbreaking Global Deal for Nature proposal. The proposal calls for a milestone of at least 30% of lands protected by 2030 with an additional 20% in climate stabilization areas. It is also the first global plan to include land, freshwater, and marine ecoregions.
In this article, Teo Grossman, Senior Director of Programs and Research at Bioneers, interviews Dr. Carly Vynne about the need to prioritize biodiversity in the pursuit of global climate justice.
TEO GROSSMAN: Can you tell us about your background and story: how you got here, where you grew up, and what inspired you?
CARLY: I grew up in Seattle, and I served as a ranger with the National Park Service for a few summers in my college years. During that time, I got to explore, learn and teach about the biologically diverse gem of the Olympic Peninsula. I quickly realized the Olympic Peninsula needs people to advocate for its conservation. I loved that place, and it was only there because people had worked hard to protect it. That was a profound lesson that shaped me for the rest of my life. That set me on a path of focusing on conservation biology and large-scale land protection in my studies and work. I couldn’t think of a better job than combining being out in nature studying animals while working intellectually to explore interesting scientific questions and trying to solve challenging problems.
TEO: Did you have an innate fascination with animals as a kid? Were you always interested in them?
CARLY: I was lucky that I was exposed to beautiful places as a child. Instead of going to summer camp, I stayed with my grandparents who lived on the San Juan Islands, and I spent my time down in tide pools making tide pool zoos and sorting animals. But I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life. My dad was in the mining industry and worried when I didn’t know what I would major in, so he advised me to go into Environmental Studies. I think in his mind that meant that I would learn how to reclaim and restore polluted or damaged sites (maybe including ones the mining industry had ravaged?). He certainly didn’t expect that I’d end up becoming a biodiversity specialist, advocating for the protection of large landscapes, so his advice turned out to be good, but probably not in the way he expected.
TEO: What do wild places mean to you? Why do they matter?
CARLY: For one thing, being in a wild place is one of the best ways to connect us to something much greater than our own lives. I love being in an area that has had the same animals there for hundreds of years, and it’s exciting to get to see rare birds and follow the tracks of different animals.
And of course, as a scientist, I think a lot about what ecosystems do for us, making human life possible, and of the burning need to ensure that future generations have some remnants of this planet’s biodiversity and of the species that are here during our current lives. Ecosystems decline when they are cut up into small, separate, ever-shrinking enclaves, which is what is happening. If we want some hope of a healthy biosphere, we have to protect some much bigger areas, and that’s what I’ve been working on.
TEO: You were instrumental in part of the writing and crafting of this concept called the Global Deal for Nature, which outlines a goal of fully protecting 30% of the Earth’s surface and sustainably managing another 20% within the next 10 years. How far do we have to go to hit those goals?
CARLY: As regards the terrestrial realm, our immediate, short-term goal is to conserve 17% of the terrestrial realm as soon as possible and to build on that to protect the 30% target by 2030, and that 17% might be within reach, at least on paper, but in the oceans we’re much further behind in terms of area percentage relative to the targets. What we’ve been saying is that to halt biodiversity loss, we need about half the Earth protected. The challenge is that biodiversity is very unevenly distributed, so a target such as “half” needs to make sense for each place. At the end of the day, each region will need to look at how best to conserve the ecosystems and species in that place, so total amounts of protected land and the conservation strategies will vary a lot.
What we’ve done is to systematically look across the Earth’s surface at each of the 846 “eco regions” and to see, in those places that have developed conservation or bioregional plans, what the local experts have said is needed to credibly protect the biodiversity there. And their estimates cover a wide range. In some places protecting 30% would be enough, while a region such as the Amazon probably needs to be 80 to 90% intact to be able to maintain a functioning ecosystem due to the high turnover of species there, but the average of the expert estimates, globally, is about half. And, honestly, most of these regional plans probably vastly underestimate what they need to protect, because only a small percentage of them actually take climate change into account. If you factor in climate adaptation, the need to protect more land to maintain the integrity and functionality of many ecosystems becomes very obvious.
TEO: Can you explain a bit more about the concept of “eco regions” and how you use them in your work?
CARLY: Eco regions are designated by biogeographers and species experts who track and map where specific groups of lifeforms that are somewhat similar live, and these regions of course tend to also be defined by their distinctive climate patterns, types of landscapes, amounts of rainfall, etc. There have been eco region-based approaches to conservation for a while. It’s not a new concept. There are a variety of different approaches to setting conservation goals, such as focusing on biodiversity hotspots, areas that have the most diversity. Other approaches include focusing on saving those places with endemic species that are under threat or at risk of extinction. Eco-regional approaches are broader: they are more geared to protecting some of everything, and because we wanted a comprehensive strategy for the whole Earth, an eco-region-based approach really made the most sense.
TEO: Can you share with us how the Global Deal for Nature differs from previous approaches to biodiversity conservation over the past few decades?
CARLY: For the past few decades, until very recently, biodiversity conservation was seen by governments as somewhat of a fringe pursuit, and the funding was such that the approach had to be trying to get the most for the least—how to conserve the most species with scarce dollars, hence the focus on biodiversity hotspots. What’s different now is that more and more people and leaders have finally realized that climate change is bringing much faster and greater ecosystem disruption than any of us had anticipated, and the best science, the best climate models are pretty clear: we can’t lose any more functioning ecosystems to have any chance of stabilizing the climate and addressing plummeting biodiversity. It means that all of the approaches to conservation are important and necessary now—we need it all. And that’s where the Global Deal for Nature was different: we realized and just came out and said very clearly that we need to protect all of this land globally, that there is no other option. That being said, there are still some areas in which we are going to have to make tough decisions and to prioritize conserving nature.
TEO: Beyond conservation, what role might restoration and regeneration of already damaged lands play?
CARLY: That’s a very important question, because if we’re going to say we need to do something, it’s important to say what’s necessary, but it’s also important to understand that within the context of what can actually be done in places around the world now, facing the realities on the ground. And the sad fact is that in nearly a quarter of the world’s eco-regions, only 4% of genuinely intact, biodiverse habitat remains. In those places, protecting half anytime soon doesn’t make sense. In many of those places, protecting 10 or 11% would be a real win, and the real effort in those regions has to be about large-scale restoration projects. But in some of the other three-quarters of the planet, there are places where there is sufficient habitat to protect large tracts of still somewhat intact landscapes, so whether one emphasizes conservation or restoration depends on the current conditions in specific eco-regions, but huge efforts on both fronts will be necessary.
TEO: Could you explain what form restoration takes in different places? And in general, what really needs to be done to restore ecosystems?
CARLY: As with biodiversity which is so unique to each place and so unevenly distributed, there have to be many approaches. In some places just leaving the land so it can heal itself is the best strategy. Many forested regions in particular can lend themselves well to that strategy.
Even landscapes that have some level of degradation or have been denuded but still have some natural forests around them will for the most part restore themselves very quickly if they’re left alone and not damaged further. In other places far more concerted management action is required, and in others we may need to use more direct interventions, such as the introduction or re-introduction of key species. We are going to need to put in place significant policies here in the U.S. and around the world to provide really good training and jobs and really mobilize very large-scale ecosystem restoration projects. And even the lands that can mostly repair themselves will require a lot of monitoring and protection. A whole lot of much wiser (than in the past), science-based, hands-on management is going to be needed.
TEO: One of the concepts that the Global Deal for Nature introduces is something called “climate stabilization areas.” What are those and how would they work?
CARLY: The idea is this: we know that even if we double the global protected area system, the world’s parks, in the next 10 years (and we actually protect those lands so they’re not just “parks” on paper but genuinely safeguarded, biodiverse ecosystems), so that we achieve that target of 30% of global land genuinely protected (and it’s a very ambitious goal which will require intense efforts to achieve), that still doesn’t get us to the 50% scientists tell us we absolutely need to succeed in stabilizing climate and preserving sufficient biodiversity on our planet. So, we still need another mechanism for protecting the remaining 20%, and there are in fact large areas of somewhat intact forests and prairies and other ecosystems that are not the highest priorities as regards conservation, that aren’t biodiversity hotspots, but that can be really important for climate regulation. Those areas would perhaps not need to have the same intense level of protection as the 30%, but they would have to still be maintained as mostly intact and/or managed as benignly as possible so they are not overdeveloped or ravaged, and some of them could benefit from large-scale restoration initiatives. That 20% could play an enormous role in carbon sequestration, hence our designation of them as “climate stabilization areas.”
TEO: Can you explain the connection between biodiversity conservation and climate change?
CARLY: Biodiverse ecosystems play a crucial role in sequestering carbon. It’s frustrating that people are focused on climate change at the expense of biodiversity. And it was especially frustrating because it was clear to us that the very same strategies that we needed to implement to preserve the planet’s biodiversity were the same ones that would most effectively help us mitigate climate change. But I’ve come around to feel that maybe climate can be our savior, the wake-up call we needed to address all our problems, because it’s already affecting human lives and economies and everything else in very obvious ways, so now that much of the world seems to finally understand that we need a lot of intact nature to stabilize climate.
TEO: Biodiversity loss is something most people don’t perceive in their daily lives. A major bird study came out recently that reported on the large-scale loss of enormous quantities and species of birds in North America. Is there something that you think we’ve lost as humans, now that so many of us are out of touch with the natural world, so that so many of us just don’t notice?
CARLY: On one hand, there are more and more ways to monitor what’s happening, with amazing new remote sensing and mapping technologies. The team at Google Outreach have done great work collaborating with Amazonian peoples, for example. It’s incredible what we can monitor and see from space, and time-lapse photography and film can show us so much we couldn’t previously see in the natural world.
But all that great visual imagery and those powerful new tools, as important as they are, don’t really connect people with the living reality of the natural world, the sounds, and the critters. I’d like to see more kids have opportunities to connect with nature, and I’d really like to see us do a better job of capturing and communicating the sounds and sights of the living, breathing forests to connect more folks to the experiences to be had in a full, living biosphere.
TEO: E.O. Wilson popularized the term “biophilia.” How much does biophilia play into the work that you do?
CARLY: I think that just about all of us in the field are motivated by some form of biophilia. I can’t think of anyone I’ve worked with who didn’t get into the field because of a passion for nature and other living beings, and I think that almost every human, deep down, has some appreciation and wonder and desire for connection with the natural world, which is what E.O. Wilson was driving at with the “biophilia” concept. That said, it’s also true that a lot of people in different fields are now engaged in conservation work. It’s not just naturalists cataloguing ants any more. There are economists, bankers, engineers, policy analysts, etc., involved in conservation these days, and some of them may be, on average, less wildly biophilic than wildlife biologists, but they can be major changemakers.
TEO: Part of what I really appreciate about the work that you’ve done and about the project is that you’re really trying to ask really big questions, which is not always appreciated in the sciences, where one tends to focus on asking small, answerable questions that can be tested. Whereas you and your colleagues are asking: “What would it take to save life on Earth, stabilize climate, and maintain essential ecosystem services?” That’s a huge question. What did it take for a bunch of rigorous scientists to get to the point at which you all felt comfortable asking that sort of a mega-question?
CARLY: Many of us on the team have been involved in conservation for decades and it’s begun to be obvious to more scientists and activists that that approach was a losing battle. And when we engaged with Indigenous peoples, who have managed ecosystems for millennia, many of them told us that they managed their lands by leaving around half of them off-limits for long stretches. So, as more and more of a scientific consensus was being reached about the need to protect half of the Earth if we were to have any real chance of stabilizing climate and reversing biodiversity loss, and as it was increasingly obvious that we had very little time to turn things around, we really had no choice but to try to go big. Sticking to an incremental, reductionist approach when the clock is running out on saving the future of life just didn’t make sense.
TEO: So now your team has formulated the big questions, done enormous amounts of research, and proposed a number of strategies. What comes next?
CARLY: There are many, many levels to an undertaking of this magnitude, to push a global vision. We will definitely have to pressure governments to set aside more protected areas (and to actually protect them on the ground), but to get to half and to a genuinely sustainable world—the vision that most of us want – it’s going to take tens or hundreds of thousands of people from a wide range of walks of life sitting down in their communities, looking at maps and making hard decisions about how to protect what’s needed in their regions in the way that makes the most sense where they are, so part of the solution will be a bioregional approach.
I was on a panel recently with people from the Amazon Headwaters Initiative, an amazing bio-regionally-based project that is trying to bring together many different Indigenous groups and local people to develop a common vision for their incredibly important and very large Amazonian headwaters region. Their work involves reaching agreements among many stakeholders about how to map and set targets and, once agreed upon, defend a common vision that guarantees the integrity and vitality of that ecosystem. That’s a hard and messy undertaking, a lot messier than governments just drawing lines and declaring parks, but getting local people’s full engagement and buy-in is ultimately the only way forward that can work in the long-term, so it’s going to have to be done around the world.
And I see signs of hope even in unlikely places. I grew up in Seattle, and it’s changed so much. It’s a really dense city now. You can stand downtown and see five Amazon buildings on your right and five Google buildings on your left, but you can actually also look at mountains that are now occupied by gray wolves, which wasn’t the case 20 years ago. People can feel proud that they can live in a big city with all it can offer and all its problems and also have restored wild and abundant nature within easy access. We can coexist with vibrant nature, and that’s something we can achieve in more and more places…and we have to.
The profit-hungry agribusiness empire of the 20th century institutionalized farming practices that continue to degrade soils across the U.S. and globally. We face a fork in the road: collapse or regeneration? The good news is that we know what we need to begin an agricultural and ecological renaissance – a literal rebirth.
Biologist Ann Biklé and geologist David Montgomery share one of the good news stories that show how the solutions residing in nature surpass our conception of what’s even possible.
Featuring
David R. Montgomery, a Seattle-based MacArthur Fellow and professor of Geomorphology at the University of Washington and the author of award-winning popular-science books that have been translated into nine languages, is an internationally recognized geologist who studies landscape evolution and the effects of geological processes on ecological systems and human societies.
Anne Biklé, a biologist, science communicator, and public speaker, investigates and writes about connections between people, plants, food, health, and the environment. Her work has appeared in magazines, newspapers and radio, and her soil-building practices have been featured in independent and documentary films.
Credits
Executive Producer: Kenny Ausubel
Written by: Kenny Ausubel and Arty Mangan
Senior Producer and Station Relations: Stephanie Welch
Producer: Teo Grossman
Host and Consulting Producer: Neil Harvey
Program Engineer and Music Supervisor: Emily Harris
Production and Engineering Assistance: Rebekah Wineman
Production intern: Isabelle Dean
Resources
Learn more about David and Anne’s work and books at their website, dig2grow.com.
Explore Bioneers’ Regenerative Agriculture media hub to learn more about practices that increase biodiversity, build and enrich soil, improve watersheds, enhance ecosystem services, and increase soil carbon storage.
Subscribe to The Food Web, our food-and-farming newsletter sharing the stories and celebrating the people whose work builds local food systems that serve people and embed ecological stewardship into agricultural practices.
This is an episode of the Bioneers: Revolution from the Heart of Nature series. Visit the radio and podcast homepage to find out how to hear the program on your local station and how to subscribe to the podcast.
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Transcript
NEIL HARVEY, HOST: We’ve been treating our soil like dirt. The consequence is that it’s déjà vu all over again. All over again, we face both peril and promise.
The 1930s Great Depression was as much an environmental collapse as an economic bust.
Driven by insatiable capitalist appetites, plowmen farmed places that ought never to have been farmed and shredded fragile ecosystems.
They managed to strip the native grasses, a finely tuned symphony of perennial species that had evolved and flourished for over 20,000 years.
As author Timothy Egan wrote, “The tractors had done what no hailstorm, no blizzard, no epic siege of frost, no prairie fire, nothing in the natural history of the southern plains had ever done.”
By 1937, there were a record-breaking 134 dust storms that excavated the precious, scant topsoil, dropping 12 million tons of the black gold on Chicago and onto ships as far as 300 miles off the East Coast.
Overall, lands in 19 states had pretty much lost their topsoil. The barren Dust Bowl precipitated plagues of locusts, jackrabbits and green worms. Birds and snakes were no longer to be found.
It made a bumper crop of “Exodusters” leaving farms behind.
President Franklin D. Roosevelt warned this: “The nation that destroys its soil, destroys itself.”
He responded with a visionary slate of federal supports and innovations that revolutionized the beneficial treatment of the land – and of farmers. At least for a time.
Tragically, the same misbegotten, profit-hungry agribusiness empire institutionalized practices that have badly degraded soils across the U.S. and globally. And in this turn of the crank, the new twist is catastrophic climate change.
Once again, we face the same fork in the road: collapse or regeneration?
The good news is that we know what to do to begin an agricultural and ecological renaissance – a literal rebirth. And it starts right under our feet.
But we’re playing a dangerous game of Beat the Reaper, and it’s for keeps. So warned David Montgomery at a Bioneers conference.
David Montgomery
DAVID MONTGOMERY: Soil erosion played a role in the demise of civilizations, going all the way back to the earliest agricultural civilizations in the Middle East to Neolithic or Bronze Age Europe to Classical Greece, Rome, Southern United States, Central America. I went through and sort of collated the archaeological literature, the historical literature, and the modern geological literature, because you can still go and see degraded soils in those parts of the world, and if you want examples, think Syria and Libya today. Those are places where we have Roman tax records of high harvests, several thousand years ago, where they cannot really essentially feed a growing population today.
And the problem was not what you’d generally find in environmental history textbooks. What you generally find is that deforestation caused erosion and degraded the land. The real problem was the tillage that followed. It was the plow, not the axe.
HOST: David Montgomery is Professor of Earth and Space Sciences at the University of Washington, and a MacArthur fellow.
As a geologist who studied soil erosion in natural systems, he decided to update the literature, which dated back to the 19th century. He spent four years on his book, Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations.
He found a common thread in the archaeological and agronomic literature: The way human societies treat their landscapes is how the land will eventually treat their descendants.
Soil erosion and soil degradation inevitably undermine a society over time. They make it vulnerable to drought, climate change, political instability, food riots, and wars.
DM: Imagine what a plow does to the soil: It inverts it. It turns it over. And it’s intentionally doing this for weed control, because a plow is very good weed control. But it also means that the soil is left bare and vulnerable to erosion by wind or rain until something grows on it, whether a weed or the next crop. And that can basically add up over time.
If you look today at the state of the world’s soils, we’re losing about 0.3% of our ability to feed ourselves each and every year due to degradation of the soil. That .3% sounds like a small number. It’s probably about what we’re all getting on interest for our savings accounts. It takes a while to notice. But you play that out over the next 100 years, and that turns into 30%. We cannot afford to lose 30% of our ability to feed the world before our population goes up by 50%.
The soil carbon content of many soils in North American is only about half of what they were when they were first converted from forest or prairie lands to farms.
Iowa has lost 50% of its topsoil in the last 150 years. These trends are depressing.
It takes centuries for nature to make an inch of topsoil. We’re losing it in decades. Those numbers defy the definition of sustainability. We are basically bleeding topsoil. And this has been going on for civilizations around the world.
HOST: David Montgomery grappled with the fateful question: Could soil be restored to a fertile state and defuse the ticking time bomb of agricultural collapse?
He embarked on the quest with his wife Anne Biklé. She describes herself as an “out-of-bounds biologist” because she has applied her training in biology to fields as diverse as environmental planning, salmon restoration and public health.
Their writing journey began when the couple bought a house in North Seattle. She desperately wanted a garden.
Anne Biklé spoke with us at a Bioneers conference…
Anne Biklé
ANNE BIKLÉ: Here’s the biologist and the geologist, both of whom have dug soil pits around in various aspects of our work, but we never really thought to dig a soil pit in our own backyard. And it was sick. It was not well. We had had some heavy equipment come into the yard, and they scraped everything out that was there. It fully exposed the soil. And everyone thinks, oh, Seattle, it’s all green and nice and everything up there. Well, our soil looked like it could have been out in New Mexico. It was kind of sandy-colored. It was really rocky, and there was nary a worm and hardly any organic matter. And it was the middle of August when this all sort of came to light, and we had a lot of plants on the sidelines waiting to get into the ground. And here we were with really some pretty dead dirt. That was a time of panic and a time of Uh oh, what are we going to do?
And I had done enough restoration in salmon watershed stuff, and I’d done enough gardening that I thought, okay, my gut is telling me that this soil is deficient in organic matter, so that’s going to be the number one thing that I’m going to start on is getting organic matter and getting it into the soil. And so that was not a highly technical kind of an undertaking in that I didn’t set about, you know, we need this kind of organic matter and that kind, and in these ratios and proportions, and so on. I really began collecting what was cheap or free in the neighborhood, and I began making all of these different mulch mixes.
And what is funny about that is that I am outside working my tail off trying to bring soil back to life, he is inside surrounded by books, looking out the window at me pushing this wheelbarrow that’s loaded, about to tilt over.
HOST: Her geologist husband was intently studying the history of how nature builds topsoil, and how it gets depleted in the first place.
Right under their feet in their own backyard lay the evidence of the geological history of erosion.
DM: Seattle is a place where from about 15 to 17,000 years ago, a glacier came out of British Columbia, marched south because it was snowing a lot in British Columbia, the ice piled up. You get a big enough pile of ice, it starts to flow under its own weight. And this tongue of ice came all the way out of British Columbia, overran Seattle, and made it all the way down to Olympia, well south of Seattle, buried Seattle under a mile high wall of ice. But what it had also done is it had laid down in front of that advancing glacier all the bits of sand and bits of eroded granite that had come with the ice but that didn’t melt when the ice melted, got reworked by streams in front of the advancing ice, and then overrun by that ice. And so what that did was it basically laid down a blanket of sediment and then compacted it into something that I like to think of as nature’s concrete, which is not the best soil.
After that, when the glaciers receded, it took thousands of years for the forest to come in and actually build a good soil on top of that geological concrete. Then when they cleared our neighborhood to build our house in 1918, what do you do when you basically develop a neighborhood? You strip off the topsoil and there, what was left underneath, was this glacial till, nature’s concrete.
But after Anne started what we call her organic matter crusade, of bringing organic matter back to our lot, what was it, maybe about three, four years into it that [ANNE: Yeah] we started to notice the color of the soil changing, and that the soil beneath the lawn that we’d sort of carefully put it in right flush with the patio that we put in, the soil was now about an eighth of an inch higher. It was fluffing up and it was getting darker. And so we were trying to figure out what was it that was actually turning that compost and mulch, all that organic matter that Anne was adding to the yard. What was turning that into soil organic matter was the intellectual journey, if you will, that we set off on in researching The Hidden Half of Nature, to understand, why was this happening? How was it happening? And that led us to the role of microbial life.
HOST: Although science has barely scratched the surface of this intricate underworld, we do know that a quarter of all species on earth live in the soil microbiome. Just one tablespoon of healthy soil has more organisms than there are people on the planet. We’ve identified only about 1% of soil microbial species.
Microorganisms provide ecosystem services including transforming so-called “waste” into organic material and valuable nutrients, and regulating the distribution of those nutrients among microbial species, fungi and plants.
That nutrient cycling is the basis for nature’s self-renewing fertility.
It’s a symbiotic exchange, as plant roots send carbohydrates back into the soil to feed the microorganisms.
AB: We’re going to go to a wild and alive place in the soil called the rhizosphere. Think of it like a halo that goes around each and every root hair of a plant. And I call the rhizosphere a biological bazaar. Folks, this is nature’s quid pro quo. In return, bacteria are feeding off of this stuff, they’re growing like crazy, and they are excreting waste products. The plant is getting something it really needs that it cannot make, or if it does it makes it in small quantities, and it feeds the bacteria and says, I need growth-promoting hormones, please.
And I want to talk about the fetching fungi. Fungi are attached one end to a root hair, and with the fungal hyphae, they’re prospecting. They’re getting minerals out of rocks that are in the soil. And one of the most important minerals is phosphorus. And it’s estimated by some there’s up to 100 years worth of phosphorus sitting there in the soil but plants can’t access it. The fetching fungi, they can get at that and they can transport it back to the plant, and they can exchange it. Here’s phosphorus, and I’ll take sugars.
Really the rhizosphere and the root system of a plant is—it’s the intelligence system. The brain for the botanical world is not on the top. It’s down below ground. It’s this symbiotic relationship between roots and bacteria and everything else. There’s ceaseless, constant communication between a plant and its soil microbiome.
HOST: The couple’s backyard revelation about the role of the microbial world transformed their view of nature and how she works. It brightly highlighted the power of the nurturing role people can play to create the conditions for life to flourish — and let nature do the rest.
DM: It turns out that the order that life came back to our yard parallels the order in which life evolved on Earth. Obviously different time scales involved, right, but it started to cement the idea in our minds that ecosystems are essentially constructed from the bottom up, and that that foundation of microbial life was really essential for supporting not only the life below ground but the life that we knew above ground. Because when we restored the soil, both came back.
We obviously didn’t notice the bacteria first because there’s a reason they’re called microbes. We can’t actually detect them with our senses. But we could start seeing their effects. And then we saw the organisms in the soil, and then the worms, and then the birds that came to eat the worms, and then the bigger birds that came to eat the littler birds, culminating in something that Anne saw one day when an eagle came and took a baby crow out of our neighbor’s tree. That baby crow had been living off the worms that were growing in the restored yard. And it was a real revelation.
People had known all those pieces before, but putting it together that way in the way that we witnessed it at our own place made us start to think about the bigger picture about, well, could you restore soil at the global scale?
AB: That’s the question right there: How quickly can we do this and how much time will changes take to get the results in soil that we’re looking for? This is based on the changes in the soil in our own sort of garden experiment. And we’re even now more years out and the soil has just continued to get better and better and better.
It can happen really quickly.
I would say soil is one of the very few good news environmental stories that we have out there because once you stop hammering at it and you stop chiseling away at it, and you let the biology come back in and start doing the nutrient cycling and all of the processing, soil can rebound quite quickly, in fact.
HOST: When we return, David Montgomery and Anne Biklé describe how that backyard experiment helped unearth a world-changing way to revolutionize agriculture that rapidly regenerates soil, sequesters carbon from the atmosphere, supports farmer livelihoods, and can authentically help feed the world.
You’re listening to the Bioneers: Revolution from the Heart of Nature.
HOST: David Montgomery and Anne Biklé found another benefit in their backyard soil restoration project. Anne’s work had not only increased the beneficial microbial activity; it had also put organic matter – which is about 50% carbon – back into the soil.
They asked the driving question: Could soil restoration be a potent method to sequester carbon and help reverse catastrophic climate change?
The book Drawdown, which documents proven methods to remove CO2 from the atmosphere, had concluded this:
“It is estimated that at least 50 percent of the carbon in the earth’s soils has been released into the atmosphere over the past centuries. Bringing that carbon back home through regenerative agriculture is one of the greatest opportunities to address human and climate health, along with the financial well-being of farmers.”
DM: So I took about six months off from teaching at the University of Washington, and traveled around the world to visit farmers who had already restored fertility to their land, to try and take the lessons of that first book, the science from the second book, and apply it to—see how well it could be applied to the problem of feeding the world and regenerating agricultural soils. And that resulted in the most recent book, Growing a Revolution: Bringing Our Soil Back to Life, which is sort of the third book in what Anne and I call our dirt trilogy.
HOST: David found that the farmers were doing much more than just adding organic matter. They were following three simple, but crucial, regenerative principles of conservation agriculture.
So the first principle is minimal disturbance, minimize disturbance of the soil, which often meant going to no-till farming or not plowing, because plowing makes the soil vulnerable to erosion, it oxidizes organic matter.
The second one is, keep the ground covered with cover crops. Always keep a living plant in the soil, in part, because the roots that are then maintained are pushing exudates into the soil to feed the microbes that partner with the plants in symbiotic relationships that help build the fertility of the soil and help the health and growth of the plant as well. And then the third piece is grow a diversity of crops in the same piece of land. Don’t just keep growing the same thing year after year, or even two things and alternate one or the other like the corn and soybean rotation across a lot of the American Midwest. That’s a recipe for inviting pests to a banquet.
So minimal disturbance, cover crops, and a diversity of crops. That defines kind of the new way of looking at farming, a new sort of foundational philosophy for agriculture that happens to be the exact opposite of what we’ve been teaching in agronomy for 100 years, where we’ve been teaching intensive tillage with a lot of agrochemicals and specializing in one or two crops.
HOST: These three principles of conservation agriculture comprise a suite of practices that build fertility and can reverse the erosion crisis.
In David Montgomery’s travels, despite diverse climates, soil types and conditions, he found that when farmers embraced these three disarmingly simple regenerative principles, they reaped practical benefits beyond soil restoration.
DM: Anne and I came up with this catchy slogan that we hope everyone will repeat and spread around the world: “ditch the plow, cover up, and grow diversity”, those three principles expressed a little more popularly.
Kofi Boa
When I visited Ghana in equatorial West Africa, Kofi Boa, the gentleman pictured here with his “Got dirt? Get soil” hat, which everybody needs one of, he taught the farmers in his area to go from their traditional slash and burn farming to doing no till with cover crops. They don’t use agrochemicals for the simple reason that they don’t have any money to buy them, and this is why the green revolution did not work for subsistence farmers around the world. It’s the wrong business model for them.
So what did Kofi teach his people how to do? A style of agriculture that involved polyculture in their fields, with minimal disturbance. They cut erosion by a factor of 20. Their corn yield tripled and their cowpea yield doubled.In other words, they got better yield returns doing conservation agriculture than the green revolution did.
And it doesn’t just work in Africa. David Brandt, the gentleman pictured here from Brandt Family Farm in Ohio basically has adopted these same kind of practices. He grows corn, wheat and soybeans for the North American commodity crop markets. But that’s not all he grows. He grows a very diverse mixture of cover crops in between his cash crops.
David has been doing no till for 44 years. He then moved into cover crops. He’s now hardly using any fertilizer, hardly using any pesticides. He’s not tilling. He’s using about an eighth of the nitrogen. He’s using about just over a third of the RoundUp. He’s made 400 bucks an acre when his neighbors were losing 100 bucks an acre. This is the kind of math that made me an optimist that we could actually change conventional into more regenerative practices.
Gabe Brown is the last guy I’ll tell you about. He’s doing something else. He’s bringing livestock back into the equation. He’s bringing cows in to graze off the cover crops that he planted in the field that he then planted his market garden for farmers’ markets in. Gabe’s another one of these organic-ish farmers who’s weaned himself at this point completely off of agrochemicals, and he’s done it because he doesn’t like writing checks to the fertilizer dealer.
HOST: No natural ecosystem has evolved without animals. Ruminants such as deer and elk have a symbiotic relationship with native flora and ecosystems, especially grasslands.
When ranchers and farmers use management practices that mimic natural wildlife patterns, domestic livestock can actually cycle nutrients and spread fertility, at the same time they live a more natural and humane existence.
But the soil crisis got baked into the economics when industrialized agribusiness disrupted that integrated system by mismanaging grazing patterns, overgrazing, and moving animals off the land into concentrated animal feeding operations, called factory farms.
DM: You can restore land without the livestock, but I’ve come around to seeing livestock as a potential accelerant for soil rebuilding if you manage the livestock. So it’s not so much that cows are bad for the land but how we’ve been managing our cows is bad for the land. It’s a people management problem.
So you look at those kinds of things and you can look at regenerative agriculture as a way to rebuild soil fertility by altering one’s practices. And that can happen on conventional farms and it can happen on organic farms. A lot of organic farmers till too much, they plow too much. And they limit the ability to raise the fertility of their own land by that.
HOST: Ditch the plow, cover up, and grow diversity. And reintroduce animals to farmlands. The biologist and geologist say these regenerative practices will revolutionize agriculture and cause cascading positive effects for both nature and people.
AB: If we take better care of the land, if as a consequence of every harvest, the soil is left better off and not worse off, it’s our hypothesis that human health could be enhanced and improved. We’re getting more of the micronutrients – things like minerals, things like iron, and zinc, and selenium, and potassium, and so on. That gets into our crops, that becomes a part of the food supply. There’s research out there and evidence out there that a lot of the food in the food supply is deficient in these things, and that is hugely important for how well our immune systems function, all kinds of human health repercussions there.
DM: Well one of the things that gives me great hope around the future of agriculture is that I think there is a growing movement among US farmers to adopt more regenerative methods. There’s some really basic principles of ecology and biology at play here that we set up our modern farming system to try and work against. And I think what we’re learning is that long-held bit of advice that nature bats last, and it’s much wiser to try and work with her on your team than to try and go up against her.
HOST: In reality, these regenerative agriculture principles are not backyard stuff.
Back in 2015 at the Paris Climate Summit, the French government announced its groundbreaking policy called “4 per 1,000: Soils for Food Security and Climate Initiative”. The goal of the initiative was to increase carbon sequestered in soil by .4% per year, which would significantly reduce CO2 released into the atmosphere.
By 2025, 41 countries and hundreds of international organizations from multiple sectors had partnered with the initiative…
“Got dirt? Get soil! The Benefits of Regenerative Agriculture” with David Montgomery and Ann Biklé.
Compared to ecosystems on land, oceans don’t generally receive their due in the climate change conversation, but phytoplankton generate 50 to 80% of the world’s oxygen, and new research reveals that oceans’ role in carbon sequestration is much larger than previously realized, so marine environments turn out to be at least as crucial as terrestrial ones, and probably more so, in regulating climate. How we treat our oceans may well determine the ultimate survival of our species.
This week we highlight the work of some leading scientists and activists working to protect and restore marine habitats.
This article contains the content from the 2/01/2021 Bioneers Pulse newsletter. Sign up here to get the newsletter straight to your inbox!
Turning the Tide: Commercial Fishing & Ocean Conservation
In this article, marine ecologist Rod Fujita speaks about the importance of aligning the value of conservation with the value of people who make a living on fishing. Despite the history of conservation and the role oceans play in biodiversity, a small percentage of oceans are protected from commercial exploitation.
In a new series of community conversations, Bioneers is offering a community of dynamic and reflective learning around deep and engaging topics to discuss issues that impact our planet. Collaborate with the Bioneers community on the second Thursday of each month, starting with a conversation about water. In exploring #bluemind science and practice, we learn about creatively and collaboratively solving problems through the wisdom of water.
The first conversation begins June 10th with Wallace “J” Nichols, Ph.D.
Fall In Love With Water: A Million Blue Mind Marbles
Scientist Wallace “J” Nichols, teacher at Bioneers’ first Community Conversations event (above), has used blue marbles to connect his audiences to deep gratitude and a love for water.
This New Tool Maps and Tracks Coral Reef Bleaching
Within the past 10 years, most of the planet’s coral reef population has been affected by bleaching, with many areas dying due to bleaching events. Preserving and protecting Earth’s coral reefs is enormously important: Healthy reefs are relied upon by a quarter of all the fish in the ocean, they protect coastlines from erosion, and they provide food and jobs for hundreds of millions of people.
She is the Ocean is a documentary that explores the lives of nine astonishing women from the four corners of the globe who share in their love for the Sea. In showing how it has shaped and given direction to their lives, She is the Ocean captures a love so profound that these women have chosen to make the Sea the center of their physical, philosophical and professional lives. She is the Ocean is available to stream on all of your favorite platforms!
Saving Our Water Planet | Alexandra Cousteau discusses what we must do to conserve earth’s waters and shares her initiative to inspire and empower individuals to protect our oceans and the communities that rely on them.
The Seaweed Rebellion: Saving the Earth by Saving the Oceans | Ocean defenders Michael Stocker, Anne Rowley and David Helvarg illuminate the peril of noise and plastics pollution and the promise they see in the Seaweed Rebellion to save Mother Ocean, and ourselves.
Preserving and protecting Earth’s coral reefs is enormously important: Healthy reefs are relied upon by a quarter of all the fish in the ocean, they protect coastlines from erosion, and they provide food and jobs for hundreds of millions of people. Coral reefs throughout the world are threatened by increasing stressors — including rising ocean temperatures, pollution, and changes in tides and light levels — causing a catastrophic process called bleaching.
Coral reef bleaching occurs when reefs discharge the algae living in their tissues, which causes them to turn white. While coral bleaching doesn’t always result in the death of coral reefs, it does leave them significantly more stressed and vulnerable.
Within the past 10 years, most of the planet’s coral reef population has been affected by bleaching, with many areas dying due to bleaching events.
The Allen Coral Atlas: Mapping Reefs for Faster Action
When bleaching begins, but before reefs start to parish, conservationists and scientists have an opportunity to take swift action to protect coral reef populations from significant losses. The trick is identifying when a bleaching event has begun — something made much simpler by a new project called the Allen Coral Atlas.
“With pin-point precision, the Allen Coral Atlas maps can show changes among the world’s massive reefs at a level of detail of just a few square meters. Users can download habitat maps, satellite imagery, and ocean depth data from the interactive map. With this information, reef scientists and managers can spot threats and head off risks with innovative solutions.
Not only are the global maps providing big-picture intelligence, but also the new technology will make it possible to detect subtle changes to reefs over time. Previously, science was focused on the large-scale bleaching events after the fact. Now researchers will be able to see changes at the sediment level before a catastrophe happens. Quickly identifying and acting on potential threats to reef ecosystems can save these underwater habitats. Future applications of the atlas technology will include robotics, artificial intelligence and new satellites to further expand the platform’s capacity.”
Whenever I hear something that rings true and comes from two distinct traditions, I pay attention. Many years ago, a friend of mine related to me a Buddhist metaphor about the interconnectedness of life that suggests that every ant had been your mother in a past life for so many cycles that the milk that fed you from her breast would fill the ocean. Of course, it’s hard to take that literally, but the allegory did make me think about the kinship of life.
So, when I heard Valentin Lopez, Chairman of the Amah Mutsun Tribal Band, speak at the 2021 EcoFarm Conference during a workshop on “Regenerative Agriculture: Equity and Inclusion” about how all life is interrelated from an Indigenous perspective, it struck me that the worldview he was sharing reflected on the Buddhist perspective.
I have been involved in organic/sustainable/regenerative/agro-ecological food and farming movements for a long time now, and I’ve recently been doing some writing about Regenerative Agriculture and the importance of biodiversity. The idea that life on earth is built on the diversity of species and driven by their interactions, cooperation and competition is certainly far from a foreign concept to me, but these Indigenous and Buddhist teachings make me feel that even those of us with a firm grasp of the scientific underpinnings of biodiversity may still be missing something essential. That rational understanding doesn’t go far enough in driving home viscerally just how fundamental our kinship with the natural world is. It doesn’t capture how our loss of spiritual connection to the web of life has inevitably led to the catastrophic, tragic loss of biodiversity our species is now causing.
In his talk, Valentin Lopez explained that it is our sacred responsibility to care for all living things, and he also offered an Indigenous perspective on true wealth:
“Creator gave us the responsibility to take care of Mother Earth. We took that obligation very seriously. We learned how to take care of the plants and the birds and the fish. How to take care of the migration patterns and how to take care of the fog and how to take care of the shadows. Those were all our responsibilities. That’s what our ancestors looked at as true wealth and riches for thousands of years. Today people look at wealth as how much money they have in the bank or what kind of car they drive or what neighborhood they live in or what kind of shoes they’re wearing. They consider that true wealth; that’s totally baffling to the Amah Mutsun and most Native Americans. To our ancestors, true wealth was two things. The first is Indigenous knowledge that was passed down from generation to generation to generation about how to take care of Mother Earth and all living things. Do you know how to take care of the bears?
On California’s Central Coast, the grizzly bears and all bears in our territory did not hibernate. There was no need to hibernate because the climate was so mild, so we had the responsibility to ensure that there was a reliable food source for the bears in all four seasons. We had to learn what plants the bears need for food for the summer, the winter, the spring and the fall. That was important to us. We had to know the ceremonies to pray for balance in the four seasons. Indigenous knowledge includes our places of power and the ceremonies to call back the migrating geese, to call back the migrating salmon.
The second thing that was important to our knowledge and riches was relationship. Do you know how to ensure that your relationships are sincere and honest? Do you have truthful honest and healthy relationships within your family? Do you have those relationships with your neighbors, and the neighboring tribes, etc. It’s important to teach people how to find a mate and to be responsible adults.
And it went much further than that. Do you have strong relationships with the insects, with the four-leggeds, with the birds, with the fish? Those are sacred relationships we all have. We recognize them as our relatives. They have the same mother and father as we do. Our father is Father Sky; our mother is Mother Earth. The same is true of the deer, the rabbits and the birds. They have the same mother and the same father. They are our relatives; we have to take care of them with love, with care. We have to sing to them; we have to talk to them; we have to listen to them.
And finally, we have a relationship with Creator. Do you have a strong relationship with Creator? Does Creator listen to your prayers? Does Creator talk to you? Do you listen to Creator and hear what he is saying? Those qualities, the knowledge of our ancestors and having those healthy, strong relationships are what gave true wealth to our people. That’s what was passed down generation to generation. That’s what all of us need to go back to—knowing how to take care of Mother Earth and having those relationships with all living things.”
Valentine Lopez offers us profound teachings. Caring for Mother Earth, who feeds uncountable life-cycles, and all her manifestations – even the ineffable entities of fog and shadows – is our sacred responsibility. Gaining the knowledge to be in right relationship with all of life, is the path to true prosperity. Those are the real treasures that we risk losing.
Ocean conservation is a practice that extends back into history for generations. Our planet’s oceans sequester carbon at scales akin to the rainforest. Despite the history of conservation and the role oceans play in biodiversity, a small percentage of oceans are protected from commercial exploitation.
Rod Fujita is the co-founder and Director of Research & Development for the Environmental Defense Funds Oceans Program. As the lead senior scientist, Rod has spent over 30 years leading a team of scientists and policy experts to identify marine conservation problems and design solutions to protect the planet’s oceans. Rod is the author of the 2003 book, “Heal the Ocean: Solutions for Saving Our Seas”.
In this article, marine ecologist Rod Fujita speaks about the importance of aligning the value of conservation with the value of people who make a living on fishing.
What follows is an edited excerpt from a Bioneers 2019 panel titled “Large-Scale Landscape Conservation and a Global Deal for Nature”.
If you love life, you’ve got to love the ocean. All life comes from the ocean. The ocean still hosts the most phyletic diversity: the big groups of body forms and species on the planet. For the longest time, the oceans seemed far too vast for mere humans to perturb in any way. But we’ve somehow managed, just in the last hundred years, to fish down great stocks of fish that were once described as so thick you could walk across the backs of the cod in New England. We’ve managed to extinguish whale species that were super abundant, roaming the oceans. We’ve even managed to alter the food webs and the life support systems, and the very chemistry of the oceans themselves. It’s remarkable.
There have probably been ocean conservation heroes among us for centuries, maybe millennia. Maybe it was the first native Hawaiian who built a fishpond: an extensive watershed seascape management system, elegant in design, regenerative in nature, that restored the landscape, protected the water quality, grew all the crops people needed, and resulted in abundant fish without catching too many. Or maybe it was a Polynesian leader, who declared the first taboo on harvesting vulnerable animals that are highly valuable, like trochus, giant clams, and sea cucumbers. That led to an extensive and sophisticated system of regulation thousands of years ago intended to preserve the species of the ocean, and to make sure that the regenerative processes that maintain biodiversity and the flow of goods and services that support human well-being continue.
Well, it took a while, but 3,000 years later, modern society has kind of caught up to that traditional wisdom. I first woke up to this in the 90s, when I was starting my career, with headlines announcing crashing fish stocks, the demise of the tunas, the swordfish, the marlin, one after the other. I got activated like a lot of my colleagues at that time to protect the ocean. Our first instinct was to create protected areas like our ancestors did on the land, the people who started the wilderness movement, the people who created these really wonderful national parks, sometimes described as America’s best idea.
We started to try to create marine parks and adopt that same model of terrestrial conservation to the ocean. It was challenging because the ocean looks like a mirror. It’s hard to see the ravages that are going on under the waves. You just see the sky – it looks beautiful. But meanwhile, the underwater landscape was being trampled by trawling. It was being dynamited. It was being overfished. The wetlands were being destroyed for marinas. But it’s hard to see all that.
Also, the boundaries of these marine reserves were difficult to see and enforce. At least at a national park, you’ll see a sign that says: This is a national park. In the ocean, you can’t put up signs.
Despite these difficulties, it soon became clear to most people that if you stop killing things in an area of the ocean, they can flourish. And it sounds simple, but it took me years to convince governments in the United States and all around the world of that simple truth: If you don’t kill things, they can grow and prosper. That’s the theory of marine reserves.
Because the science was clear, and because we had learned something from traditional wisdom, this movement caught on. So 30 years later, we’ve got about 17,000 marine-protected areas covering the surface of the ocean. We’ve got about 8% of the ocean’s surface under protection. It’s creeping up there to the percentage of the land that’s protected. It sounds impressive, but when you really get down to looking at how these marine-protected areas are functioning, are they actually prohibiting killing? Are they actually preventing pollution? Are they actually preventing oil and gas extraction? The answer is no, not really.
Less than 2% of those 17,000 marine-protected areas are functional. It’s not scaling. 8% is not enough, and 2% is definitely not enough if we’re going to save the ocean.
The ocean is one of the great reservoirs of carbon and one of our great saviors from even worse climate change, along with the rainforest. The rainforest and the ocean take carbon out of the atmosphere, put it into the soil or put it into the deep water where it stays for centuries. It’s our salvation. And we’re going to need to protect more than 8% of the ocean to restore that function and keep it alive.
So how do we do that? The first step toward a cure or a solution is really a good diagnosis. We can make an easy diagnosis and say, well, fishermen are rapacious; people just want to damage the ocean for their own greedy motives. But in my experience, a lot of the people want to do the right thing. Consider the possibility of creating a marine reserve where people are impoverished, and where fishing is the employer of the last resort if you don’t have an education. These people have to feed their families. The proposition that we’re giving these folks is, “Hey, why don’t you stop fishing so that stuff can grow, and so that I, in the United States, can enjoy the biodiversity?” It’s a terrible value proposition, and that’s why conservation is not scaling in the ocean.
To reverse that, we have to align people’s incentives and their needs with the conservation proposition. We can do this. We have to embed these marine-protected areas within areas that are secure, that are reserved for the use of the people who are paying the conservation price so that they can reap the benefits of their own conservation action. That’s the key: The people who pay the cost need to get the benefits. Those benefits can’t be externalized to privileged folks who are not paying any costs but get all the biodiversity and goodies.
Here’s a quick story about how this can be put into action: There are some countries where this is happening apace. We work in Belize, a little country in the Caribbean, that has responsibility for about a third of the Mesoamerican reef system, which is the second largest reef system in the world. This is a tiny little country with very low capacity, but they created nine large marine-protected areas in these territorial waters. As of five years ago, only about 2% of that area was off limits to extraction, and the fishermen were dead set against expanding that protected nucleus.
This dynamic continued, with the fishermen opposing expansion and the environmentalists saying, “Yes, let’s expand it.” Until they created what’s called a territorial use right for fishing. It turns out the reason the fishermen were opposing these no-take reserves is not because they’re not interested in stewardship. They understand that if you stop killing fish when they’re spawning, the young fish will grow up. If you stop killing the young fish, they will grow up. They get it. It’s just that they were asked to pay the costs of not fishing while illegal fishermen from other countries and other places were coming and taking the fish. Again, it was a terrible value proposition until the Belizean government secured the fishermen’s right to claim the benefits of their own stewardship activities, and that turned the tide. It completely changed the political dynamics, it aligned the economics and the incentives with conservation, and Belize just tripled the size of its no-take reserves this last year.
This article was originally published in One Earth by Justin Winters, Co-Founder & Executive Director of One Earth.
What does a healthy ecosystem look like? What does it sound like? Does a vision come to mind of a lush jungle, teeming with vibrant flowers, chirping birds, and howling monkeys? Or perhaps, brilliant corals against ocean waters filled with schools of fish and the sound of whales calling in the distance? We often think of nature as very remote and separate from people, but in reality, some of the ecosystems that are the richest in biodiversity are also the richest in cultural diversity.
Take the Amazon region; to a visitor this immense rainforest may seem wild and untamed, but over 400 unique Indigenous peoples live here. Each group has their own language, dialect, style of dress, art, and music. For over 8,000 years they have tended and actively encouraged the diversity of plants and animals of the Amazon, and they have cultivated hybrid plants that are used for both medicine and food. There are 16,000 different tree species in the Amazon, and over 40,000 plant species. As many as three out of every ten species on Earth are found here. It has taken scientists hundreds of years to document the incredible richness of this bioregion, and still every year more species are discovered.
It is the cultural and biological diversity of the Amazon region that has created one of the most powerful engines in the fight against climate change. According to the Global Safety Net, a peer-reviewed paper that documents the full spatial extent of the world’s natural lands, 85% of the Amazon is of vital importance for biodiversity and our global climate system, locking away an estimated 150 billion tonnes of carbon. The rainforest here also creates its own weather, recycling water 5 to 7 timesbefore it completes a single hydrological cycle. This system has kept the region from turning into a savanna landscape and made it exceedingly rich in beta diversity (or complexity), which is why it is able to absorb 10-15% of our carbon dioxide emissions every year. Without the Amazon, our global climate system would collapse.
The ‘Global Safety Net’ for the Amazon: 85% of land is important for the preservation of biodiversity and carbon storage. Credit: Karl Burkart, One Earth
It’s important to point out that as much as 50% of the Amazon’s remaining intact forests are on Indigenous lands, and it is precisely these areas that harbor more biodiversity and store more carbon than any other. Historically, the guardians of the Earth’s most biodiverse lands have been Indigenous communities. These cultures understand that humans are a part of the ecosystems in which they live, not separate from them. Tending to their lands and waters for millennia, Indigenous peoples have passed down traditional wisdom and land management practices from generation to generation. It is their way of life that helps to make these places so vital for the preservation of all life on our planet.
In 2014, I was fortunate enough to visit the western Amazon region and meet several of the Indigenous leaders and communities that are now part of the Ceibo Alliance in Ecuador. Witnessing how oil extraction efforts lead by the world’s wealthiest corporations had destroyed Indigenous peoples’ lands, made their water toxic, and sickened and killed multiple generations was both eye opening and deeply disturbing. People simply cannot fight for their rights or defend their lands when they lack access to basic necessities like clean water, and when they are suffering from poor health due to decades of deep injustice and human rights abuses.
Following that journey, the foundation I was leading at that time made a seed grant to Amazon Frontlines and the Ceibo Alliance to support Indigenous-led efforts to install clean rainwater catchment systems providing hundreds of families with clean water. From there, and with sustained grant support, their efforts scaled to include territorial mapping and monitoring, partnership and coordination with other Indigenous groups across the region, and groundbreaking legal efforts that ultimately led to formal protection of 700,000 acres of rainforest in 2019. Just last year, Waorani leader and Ceibo Alliance co-founder Nemonte Nenquimo, was recognized by Time100 and the Goldman Prize for this remarkable work. Supporting emerging models of Indigenous-led conservation like those led by Nemonte, is not only the morally right thing to do, but it is a central solution to both protecting biodiversity and solving climate change.
It is more important than ever to respect and support the diverse cultures which have helped to preserve these priceless ecosystems. The complex web of life in places like the Amazon have helped to regulate our global climate system for tens of thousands of years, enabling humanity to evolve. But right now, the web is unraveling, with many Indigenous peoples facing growing pressures from extractive industries like mining, drilling, logging, and industrial agriculture. Tragically, due in part to the COVID-19 pandemic, deforestation in the Amazon spiked in 2020.
While the Amazon rainforest is the largest on Earth, there are vitally important forests and other natural ecosystems on every continent that harbor both cultural and biological diversity and are essential if we are to have a chance of limiting temperature rise to 1.5°C and rebalancing our global climate system. There are over 5,000 Indigenous and tribal groups around the world, occupying 35-40% of the world’s remaining natural land — from the Sámi in northern Europe and the Tlingit in Alaska, to the Maya in Central America and the native peoples of the Colorado Plateau; from the Zulu, Masaai, and Himba of Africa to the Bayad, Durvud, and Khalka of Mongolia; from the hundreds of unique ethnic groups in Indonesia to the aboriginal peoples of Australia, Polynesia, Melanesia, Micronesia, and Papua. These cultures hold the most ancient lineages on Earth, as well as the largest stores of biodiversity and carbon.
Every day more and more governments are waking up to the vitally important role that Indigenous peoples play. Just recently after 20 years of negotiation, the government of Peru announced it will establish a landmark Indigenous reserve for uncontacted peoples. We need more success stories like this one. A new UN Report has highlighted the powerful role that Indigenous peoples play in securing the ecosystem services that make life on Earth possible for all of humanity:
“These peoples are rich when it comes to culture, knowledge, and natural resources, but some of the poorest when it comes to incomes and access to services, and among the most affected by the pandemic, healthwise and economically. Supporting them to protect and manage their forests could help to create or recover hundreds of thousands of jobs in forestry, agroforestry, tourism, education, and cultural activities, and to avoid new pandemics, as well as providing other social, environmental, and cultural benefits.” — Forest Governance by Indigenous and Tribal Peoples, FAO
The report puts forward a clear agenda for action, all within a framework of respect for Indigenous and territorial peoples’ right to Free, Prior and Informed Consent:
Recognize collective territorial rights
Compensate communities for environmental services
Support community-led forest management
Revitalize ancestral knowledge & traditional practices
Working with the global human rights organization Avaaz, One Earth helped to launch a petition with over 150 Indigenous and environmental organizations calling for a “Global Deal for Nature” — setting a global target of protecting the world’s remaining natural lands and prioritizing and Indigenous-led conservation agenda under the UN’s Convention on Biological Diversity. In order to create the rapid and radical transformation needed to preserve our shared planet, we must ensure that every culture has a seat at the table. Representation is key. The solution to tackle the climate crisis is, at its core, intersectional. By protecting cultural diversity, we protect biodiversity. The only way to thrive is together.
The nutrients in fruits and vegetables have declined in the past 50-70 years. People may be getting enough calories but could still experience hidden hunger – a lack of essential nutrients. Arty Mangan of Bioneers interviewed Dr. Gladis Zinati of The Rodale Institute to discusses how soil health and farming practices affect human health.
Dr. Zinati, a soil scientist and director of the Vegetable Systems Trial , evaluates the impact of cropping systems and management practices on nutrient cycling, carbon sequestration, vegetable nutrient density and plant resistance to pests. She has 30 years’ experience and holds undergraduate degrees in General Agriculture and Agriculture Engineering; a M.S. in Horticulture from the American University of Beirut; and a Ph.D. in Soil Fertility from Michigan State University.
ARTY MANGAN: According to the “2014 Global Hunger Index” (compiled by the NGO Concern Worldwide) 2 billion people world-wide suffered that year from hidden hunger. What is hidden hunger?
GLADIS ZINATI: First, let’s define hunger. Hunger is usually understood as the lack of food, but according to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, hunger is defined as undernourishment, i.e. when a person is getting less than 1800 kilo-calories per day. But hidden hunger has to do with more than just the number of calories consumed. Deficiencies in micronutrients and vitamins are also forms of hidden hunger.
Why is that important? Because a deficiency in minerals and vitamins in the food we eat will ultimately weaken our immune system. In this era of the COVID-19 pandemic, if your immune system is already compromised or impaired, then your susceptibility to a disease caused by a virus such as SARS-CoV-2 (or many other diseases) is much higher. Deficiencies in minerals and vitamins not only impact our susceptibility to viruses, but also, in the long term, they can result in serious, long-term physical and mental disabilities, so to authentically address hidden hunger, we need to look at how we can improve not just the quantity of food but the nutrient density of foods.
Dr. Gladis Zinati
ARTY: USDA trend data from 1950-1999 demonstrate a decline in the protein, calcium, phosphorus, iron, vitamin A, riboflavin and vitamin C content of somewhere between 5% and 35% in a number of vegetables and some fruits. Similar declines were seen in corn and soybeans. A 2004 study by Donald Davis at the University of Texas attributed the decline in food crop nutritional density to seed breeders breeding for size, growth-rate and pest resistance while ignoring nutrition. Others say that the excessive application of synthetic nitrogen increases plants’ production of sugars at the expense of other nutrients. Irakli Loladze of Arizona State University has claimed that as CO2 levels are rising with climate change, plants are making more sugars and diluting other nutrients. What do you think of those studies, and what do you think are the main causes of nutrient declines in food?
GLADIS: There are many factors that play a role in the decline of nutrients in food. As you mentioned, seed breeders have been breeding for bigger sized fruits and vegetables. When breeders breed for plant growth, the plant takes up more water and nutrients from the soil and becomes bigger, and when you apply more synthetic nitrogen, which is readily available to the plant, the plant taps into it and grows vigorously. Plants photosynthesize more and produce more sugars, and those sugars, in the form of carbohydrates or other starches, increase at the expense of minerals. This is called a dilution effect. When you apply increased water and nitrogen; fats, proteins and carotenoids increase, but the ratio of minerals decreases.
Organic systems depend on biology. Naturally occurring nitrogen is not like the synthetic nitrogen fertilizers used in conventional farming systems; it is more mediated by biology. It needs to be digested first and then expelled by microorganisms before plants can take it up. There is a slow release of the nutrients, so the plant will not grow too vigorously or abruptly; it will grow over time, and not at the expense of the minerals. And if you have increases in CO2 in the atmosphere, which, of course, we have been seeing in the last decades, that also increases the amount of sugar that the plant is making, at the expense of nitrate, magnesium, iron or zinc.
ARTY: How does the health of soils affect nutrients in food crops?
GLADIS: Soil health is absolutely critical: it determines the availability of nutrients and plants’ capability to extract those nutrients from the soil. If the soil is not healthy and has poor drainage due, for example, to a plow layer that has compacted the soil creating a surface of only 0 to 20 centimeters, then the root development of the plant cannot penetrate vertically, and they will grow horizontally instead. As a result of the stress of compaction, a plant’s roots will be denser, but they will be deprived of any nutrients below that compacted layer compared to a similar plant grown in another environment that is not compacted and where the roots are able to get nutrients at the deeper levels of their growth.
Another example of how soil health affects the nutrients in crops has to do with organic matter. As soil health decreases, the organic matter pool also decreases, negatively affecting the microbes in the soil (which are of course essential to plant growth). Disruption of those biological processes by excessive tillage, herbicides, fungicides and synthetic fertilizers reduces the amounts of nutritional elements taken up by the plants. And if your soil is not covered with cover crops, there will be a greater possibility of erosion, and the soil-dwelling microbes will be deprived of access to roots to work with, also lowering soil nutrients. Increasing the density of plants-per-acre with cover crops not only reduces erosion but also optimizes soil health.
ARTY: Can you describe the work you’re doing with the Rodale Vegetable System Trial?
Organic versus conventional farming trials at Rodale Institute
GLADIS: The Vegetable Systems Trial is a long-term comparison side-by-side of organic and conventional cropping systems on the same soil type and under the same climate conditions.
Every year I grow five crops: a tuber such as potato; sweet corn, which is botanically classified as a fruit; green beans or winter squash; and a leaf crop such as lettuce. The project has two major goals. One is to provide, over time, rigorous data for growers to have viable economic options for long-term sustainability when growing vegetable crops. The second and main focus is to compare and understand the impacts of conventional vs organic cropping systems and management practices. How do they affect plant health in regards to pests and nutrient uptake? How do those systems compare in how they affect the soil environment in regards to nutrients and microbes? How does the application of herbicides such as glyphosate impact plant health and soil health?
Ultimately, the goal is to find how all this links to human health. We want to provide that information to the public, to medical doctors, governments, and policymakers. In the future, we would like to see more Vegetable System Trials across the nation in different regions to look at how, under different conditions, such as different climates and soil types, the data will vary.
ARTY: What have you found so far about nutrient density when you compare organic to conventional crops?
GLADIS: We have a long-term plan for the Vegetable Systems Trial. We just harvested a fourth growing season, so it is pretty early to draw any definitive conclusions, especially when looking into nutrient density. When I look at certain minerals and vitamins, I sometimes see that organic is higher than the conventional, and sometimes I find that there is no difference, but it is still early. We really need a minimum of five to ten years of data to pinpoint the trends and to confidently track how nutrient density is changing with time.
ARTY: There are conflicting studies about the nutrient density in organic food. In 2008, Dr. Charles Benbrook (who at the time was Chief Scientist of The Organic Center) and scientists from Newcastle University published in the British Journal of Nutrition a meta-analysis that found higher levels of antioxidants and polyphenols in organically produced food, but a 2012 Stanford University study claimed that there was “no strong evidence that organic foods are significantly more nutritious than conventional foods,” even though “organic produce had higher levels of health-protecting antioxidants.” Why do you think people are coming to different conclusions?
GLADIS: People come to different conclusions because of the sources of data, the time spent on the data, and the number of studies that they looked into to do the meta-analysis. If the systems are different or the experiments or trials have been done under different conditions, you may get different conclusions. All of that may play a role in people coming to different conclusions.
I agree with Charles Benbrook and his colleagues who say that with organic food you may expect more antioxidants and polyphenols. In the organic systems, especially if you are using a less harsh pesticide than a conventional pesticide, you are allowing more of the pests to survive. In nature, plants often react to pests by producing antioxidants in the same way human beings’ immune systems, when we are exposed to foreign bacteria or viruses, secrete enzymes and other compounds to trigger our immunity. A plant will produce more antioxidant and polyphenol compounds. Pests are really helping the plant produce those compounds. In the conventional chemical system, you spray the plants every time you see insects and pests, so you kill the natural predators and you eliminate the plant’s need to produce an immune response. It’s also true that plants under certain natural stresses, such as occasional drought or extreme temperatures also may have more antioxidants and polyphenols compared to plants that are irrigated.
Rodale Institute Farm In Pennsylvania photo by Cynthia van Elk
ARTY: There is a conversation around bacterial-dominant soils vs fungal-dominant soils. Some people advocate for fungal-dominance. Do you have an opinion about that?
GLADIS: It really depends on the conditions of the crop and the conditions of your soil. You want the fungi and bacteria ratio to be balanced. Some people think more fungal dominant soils will provide more of certain nutrients and compounds that are mediated by the fungi, and that they will protect the plant against some pathogens. In general, if your crop is short term, you really need bacterial dominance, but if it is long-term, such as perennial crops and orchards, it will make more sense to aim for fungal dominant soil because those plants often need continuous access to these compounds from the fungi.
ARTY: Do you ever inoculate your soils with mycorrhizal fungi?
GLADIS: Usually we don’t inoculate with mycorrhizal fungi because 80 percent of plants already have an association with mycorrhizae. If your soil has not been impacted much by pesticides, herbicides or tillage you will definitely find mycorrhizal fungi there already. In the four years of the Vegetable System Trials, we haven’t inoculated. However, we just got funding from the Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture to start a new trial, and we are in fact going to compare inoculating with certain mycorrhizal fungi species versus not inoculating in a few plots, most likely in sweet corn in the conventional and organic fields. We want to see how the management practices will impact the plants that are inoculated versus the ones that aren’t, and we want to see if the nutrients will be denser. We want to see if the plant will grow faster. We want to see if the plants make a better rhizosphere root system with the inoculation of mycorrhizae. We want to see if the yield would be different, and if there will be a difference in pest resistance.
ARTY: So far, has your research with the Vegetable Systems Trial given you any surprises?
GLADIS: In the Vegetable Systems Trial we started with an organic soil that had been certified for 20 years. Now that the soil has been used in our trials to compare the organic and conventional systems, we found a decline in the percent of organic matter in the conventionally-farmed fields that is happening faster than we expected in only 3-4 growing seasons. I am eager to see how those things will shape up in five years and ten years, so that we will be able to provide rigorous information to growers to show them that even if you start with good soil, i.e. you have a good level of organic matter to start, but you don’t manage it well, you can reduce your soil organic matter pretty quickly.
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