Commentary
I grew up in a conservative schizophrenic Christian home. Why schizophrenic?
Because we were conservatives who believed in compost instead of chemicals. Our church friends during the 1960s and 1970s were straight-laced Bible folks who preached the Genesis “dominion” mandate. In school at that time, we learned the term “manifest destiny” to justify exploiting an empty North America by civilized Europeans.
These ideas augmented each other in the faith community, leading our church friends to tease our family—sometimes more than good-naturedly—because we disavowed chemicals and believed pigs should be happy. It was a Conquistador mentality adapted to modern chemical and factory farming. As contrarians, our family believed strongly that God would not want a dead zone the size of Rhode Island in the Gulf of Mexico (America), three-legged salamanders, and infertile frogs.
But to be a conservative and spout environmentalist thinking irritated our church friends. Our farming friends were a motley group of dope-smoke hippies. The beaded, bearded, bra-less fraternity opposed the Vietnam war, expressed promiscuity at Woodstock, and embraced earthworms. Oh no. I grew up in this strange philosophically oppositional conundrum.
How could a Christian be an environmentalist? How could an environmentalist read the Bible? The two groups seemed incompatible. One worshiped a Creator who planned to burn it all down in the end times and the other worshiped the Creation and gave not a hoot about a Creator. Welcome to my world.
As a kid and then a teen, these contradictions didn’t create vexations; I just learned what I could say with each group; and what I probably shouldn’t say. But as I aged, I did become vexed about this because I saw the deficiency in each group and believed a reconciliation was imperative. Our family believed creation stewardship demanded a practical and even visceral appreciation of divine ownership.
As a conservative and even libertarian Christian, I irritated my church friends by questioning factory farming and chemical agriculture. At the same time, I irritated my ecologically-minded farming friends by invoking a God responsibility to caretake His possessions. Throughout my life I’ve enjoyed the distinct privilege of irritating everyone.
As the environmental movement became more radical with ideas like the Buffalo Commons (get rid of all farmers in America’s heartland and let it all revert to wildness), criminalizing pond digging (water hoarding), and incessant demand for roadless wilderness areas, I realized how deep guilt drove the thinking. Any intentional student of history knows Americans are not the first to deplete aquifers, erode the soil, and destroy an abundant resource base. From Easter Island to Libya, the story of human civilization, and agriculture, is generally one of ecological exploitation and diminution.
Civilizations rise and fall based on soil health. The normal student, then, inevitably begins to abhor the human-nature interaction as one that inherently harms the planet. A human-loathing mentality creates the policy: environmentalism by abandonment. The historical pattern makes the average person believe that the only responsible way to interact with nature is to leave it alone. Don’t touch. Don’t interact. Lock it up and keep humans far away.
I get it. But is environmentalism by abandonment the answer? As more land becomes protected from human interaction, is this the only response to exploitive human history? I suggest a different response. Yes, repenting in sack cloth and ashes for the deprivations of our forebears is a good thing. But once that’s over, let’s stand up, dust ourselves off, engage our hands and head and chart a new course.
The hands and head that hurt can also heal. Destruction does not have to be the outcome of human-nature interaction. For the sake of this discussion, I want to stay away from mining and drilling for oil. I want to stay focused on agriculture and the dominant human interaction with nature. And for that, I suggest a participatory environmentalism is not only the answer, but the best response.
America’s overall landscape degradation is dramatic. North America produced more food pre-European than it does today. More than 100 million bison roamed the plains. Some 200 million beavers ate more vegetation than all the humans today. Passenger pigeons flew overhead in flocks large enough to block out the sun for a day. Some two million wolves consumed nearly 20 pounds of meat per day, each. Much like the aborigines of Australia, the Native Americans strategically burned, trapped, and hunted to balance the ecology, move animals around, and stimulate resources.
Lewis and Clark journaled that during their entire expedition from St. Louis to the Pacific Ocean, they encountered a bear every mile. Can you imagine? Roughly 8 percent of the terrain was water (beaver ponds); today it’s less than 4 percent.
When Europeans came, they dried out the landscape, cut the biggest trees, plowed the prairie, overgrazed the forages, and eroded enough soil to fill a train from the earth to the moon each year. The ecological trajectory of America is not good. Depleting aquifers, plummeting pollinators, and poisoned water (700 riparian dead zones) do not bode well for a prosperous future. Does anyone think Wall Street is more important than earth worms? Really?
Is our ecology beyond redemption? No. We need to kick participatory environmentalism into high gear. That means looking at ancient abundance—what greeted the first Europeans—and begin restorative protocols. Here is a short, abbreviated action plan.
- Build ponds. Thousands. Be beavers by using diesel-power (yes, hands and intellect) to excavate ponds to save and leverage surface runoff. Roughly one-third of all raindrops become surface runoff, meaning the soil is either already saturated or the rainfall comes too fast for absorption. Many government regulations outlaw ponds. Inventorying surface runoff is not hoarding water; it’s protecting folks downstream from floods and offering the landscape riparian equity for hydrologic flourishing.
- Controlled grazing. Wild herds move, mob, and mow; they don’t stay in one place. With modern electric fencing we can mimic soil-building and forage-enhancing native animal choreography with domestic livestock. With portable infrastructure, water line, and good management, we can produce far more on native forages than in factory houses and feedlots, all while building soil at unprecedented rates. This would drop corn and soybean production by half.
- Composting. Yes, big time. We can eliminate the billions spent on wildfires and insurance by chipping biomass. This would provide an entire new carbon economy industry (the real thing, not some cap and trade government scam) and eliminate any need for chemical fertilizer. It would integrate open and forest land synergistically and provide affirming employment for thousands of folks who enjoy working outside. Fancy that.
- Regional food systems. Historically, people consumed food near where it grew. Except for salt and spices, nothing traveled far. In 1900 a calorie of food on the plate took about a calorie of energy; today, 15 calories per plate calorie is the norm. The average morsel travels 1,500 miles from farm to plate. Shortening the supply chain inherently incentivizes more agricultural diversity in a region. That stimulates pollinators and creates a more secure food system.
This protocol leverages our hands and heads in a participatory environmentalism. Let’s all get busy and do our part to make our ecology abundant again.
