Permaculture, Soil Health, Food Insecurity & Climate Change
by Asa Boxer
Failure of Stewardship
I promised a while back that I would address the issue of soil rehabilitation and today’s the day. It has been recognised for well over 50 years that our farming methods exhaust soils. Somewhere along the way we also learned that this loss of soil health was leading to low-nutrition produce. The worst of it is that fruits and veggies, our healthiest options—the non-processed foods—are presently poison apples full of harmful pesticides. As if that weren’t enough, these foods are genetically modified for extended shelf life, which is no life at all. All this loss of quality presents itself as a lack of flavour. Our tongues tell us it’s dead food. But our science (following Galileo’s distinction between quantitative and qualitative), tells us that flavour is an illusion. So forget what your tastebuds tell you; the true Truth is counterintuitive. Meanwhile despite TheScience™ cleverly industrialising, modifying, poisoning, and deflavouring our food in an export-friendly manner—supposedly, to keep prices low by the law of supply and demand—food prices have been soaring. We’re now paying unprecedented dollars for the lowest quality foods ever to be coaxed out of the dirt.
The logic of big ag (as with big-corporate everything) is profit directed and therefore seeks its gains at the expense of as much as possible. The ethics of big ag is destructive: it has an opportunistic, exploitative, and extortionistic relationship with both the soil and the end product. This is the sort of institutional decadence that sabotages civilisations.
Enter TheScience™ to save the soil and it’s just more corporate junk. Add the missing chemistry (goes the reasoning) and Voila! Great soil again. Thing is, it’s not working because Nature is more than simple chemistry. (There’s something to be learned about how we’ve been treating our bodies from how we’ve been treating the soil. There are many parallels. And evidently, we are no more a mere assemblage of chemicals than is the soil.)
The trouble with our present methods is that we till the land, which aerates it, kicking the essential microbial life into hyperdrive. The initial results are impressive because those microbes do a lot of work making nutrients available to the plants and trees. Unfortunately, the critter population boom results in a population crash, and before you know it, you need to fertilise heavily. Fertilising organically is expensive, so the tendency is to cook up some chemicals and till that in instead.
In short, we kill the microbial life of the soil and then, to compensate, add the nutrients the microbes would have produced. Call it, farma medicine for the soil. Since the microbes are in a sorry state, the nutrients sit in the soil without any help from these critters to get them to where they need to be.
Moreover, the vast tracts of land cleared of trees and weeds and furrowed for crops is erosion prone because it’s water retention capacity is destroyed by uprooting the biome. Consequently, as we overuse chemical fertiliser, the water doesn’t sit in a healthy water table; instead it just runs off with all the toxins, and finds its way to rivers and lakes and bays and various other waterways. If that weren’t bad enough, wind erosion carries chemical fertiliser into the air with topsoil dust.
And it’s not only agricultural microbes and water tables and fresh air that we destroy through our farming methods, it’s the mycorrhizal element as well—the role played by fungal networks in healthy ecosystems. Through tilling and salting and parching the earth, we kill off the soil life and create a cycle of dependency on farma products. (Anyone recognise this business model?) If I may be permitted an analogy, TheScience™ has been playing oxycodone pusher to agriculture.
Another farming method that causes soil depletion is monoculture—growing one crop in a field to maximise yield of that one product to supply industrial markets, including export. The consequence of raising one sort of plant or tree to the exclusion of others in a vast tract is that pests can sense the area from outerspace. Hence the need for pesticides. Once a pest gets in, there’s no ecosystem to bring about a balance. The natural predators have no habitat. Moreover, the crops lack robustness to fend off the critters, owing to the lack of soil health. The cycle gets progressively worse. The DuPonts of this world get wealthier. And true farmers running small and medium farms go under as big farma steps on their throats. Meanwhile, the public eats poison and gets sick more often, enriching the other big pharma. Great business plan.
Climate Impact
There are further impacts of this sort of deforestation and farming on local weather patterns and overall climate health. Julius Ruechel just published an essay to promote his new book Plunderer’s of the Earth. Here’s a quotation emphasising the magnitude of the damage arising from our lack of responsible stewardship:
“All over the world, our impact on the land is fueling colossal rates of soil erosion, which lead directly to desertification. According to UN estimates, we are losing around 24 billion tons of fertile cropland soil to erosion every year. Over 1.5 billion hectares of formerly productive land have already been lost to desertification... and that number is growing by an additional 12 million hectares per year! But contrary to popular claims, this desertification is not caused by CO2 — it’s purely the result of how we are (mis)managing the land, which is causing the land to dry out.”
As Ruechel points out by comparing the Sahara Desert to Florida (roughly at the same latitude), the daily temperature fluctuations of the desert are punishing—from extreme heat during the day to freezing temperatures at night—whereas the humidity of Florida keeps a steady temperature and protects the environment from drought. Water vapour is essential to shielding the earth from these wild fluctuations.
Ruechel supplies a case study to illustrate how the loss of local water-holding capacity of the soil can lead to glacier melting:
“For example, contrary to Al Gore's claims, Mt. Kilimanjaro's glaciers are not shrinking because the global climate has gotten warmer, but because the local climate got drier as locals deforested the perimeter of the mountain.”
Meanwhile, rainfall has been increasing. The problem is that massive tracts of land have been irresponsibly developed for both farming and for residential use. Consequently, the water has no home in the soil.
“And so, paradoxically, despite the fact that temperatures and thus global humidity and rainfall are increasing, deforestation and soil erosion are nevertheless causing many local regions to suffer from drought, falling stream levels, and declining aquifers. Our destructive impact on our local ecosystems has damaged the moisture absorbing capabilities of our soils, increased runoff rates as the extra rainfall washes away as floods instead of absorbing into the soil, and increased soil evaporation rates by removing the sod and vegetative cover that once shielded the soil from the Sun.“
from Julius Ruechel’s “The Story Beneath the Climate Story”
Ruechel advises we worry less about global CO2 and more about local water in our soils and water vapour in our air. And this observation brings us to permaculture.
The Permaculture Solution
Back in the 1970s a couple of Australians, Bill Mollison (1928-2016) and David Holmgren noticed that balanced ecosystems didn’t suffer from all the problems of modern agriculture. They realised that with observation and a different kind of science, we could come up with smart ways of growing our food while improving soil health, restoring water tables, preserving microbial and mycorrhizal life, and even minimising the time and energy needed to make it all happen. In 1978, they coined the term permaculture to represent this new approach, not just to agriculture, but to home and community structures as well.
“Permaculture is a philosophy of working with, rather than against nature; of protracted and thoughtful observation rather than protracted and thoughtless labor; and of looking at plants and animals in all their functions, rather than treating any area as a single product system.”
See Mollison, B. C., Reny Mia Slay, Andrew Jeeves. Introduction to Permaculture. Tyalgum, Australia: Tagari Publications, 1991.
Observation is the cornerstone of permaculture. It’s not intentional observation, but patient, almost objective observation. You suspend conclusions and note down everything about an environment. Light, shade, wind, rain, microclimates, human behaviour, plant behaviour, and animal behaviour. You notice habits in your own home, observe the structures in your front and back yards, the birds and butterflies and bees and bunnies; if you have chickens or livestock, how they behave too. Your purpose is to determine what they like, what they don’t like, how they move about, and how it all changes with the seasons.
Gradually, a picture forms and gradually you introduce structures and gardens in locations that take into account your observations. Those elements requiring most attention, you place close to the house; those requiring less, you place further from the house. In short, you accommodate human habits. The scale is generally individual to family size, but can also scale up to a farm.
Flexibility is another cornerstone of permaculture. The idea is to work with what you have and to address the needs of the situation. Although most permaculture enthusiasts like to grow their own food, there is room for those who simply want to restore the soil and some measure of ecosystem, by harvesting rainwater and attracting butterflies, bees, birds, bats, and other insects and animals.
The ultimate aim of permaculture is to work in harmony with what you’ve got. You only take down a tree if it’s truly the best option, and then you consider how best to harvest it and make use of it. You only add deer fencing if you can’t find a creative way to coax the local deer to one area with food-producing plants, while discouraging them from other areas by planting deer-deterrent vegetation in strategic locations. Same goes for bunnies and insects and other critters most farmers consider pests best managed with a .22 and pesticide.
And the same goes for humans. In its best expressions, permaculture accommodates our situations rather than seeks to remodel humanity according to its diktats. If you live in a city, a condo, or an apartment; if you don’t have time or inclination for gardening; if you need yard space for play or sport. . . permaculture is there to suggest ways to best be part of the solution because at the very least, you can maintain potted plants on your balcony or in your living space. If you’re a home owner, you can be harvesting rainwater and building your house broadside to the sun to harvest the sun’s warmth. You can plant deciduous trees between the sun and your home to cast shade in the summer and let in light in the winter, thereby cutting heating and cooling costs by half. So permaculture is about bringing intelligence to our living designs, mixing old technologies with new ones, upcycling, using whatever we’ve got, and working wisely with our environment to achieve a more balanced relationship with nature.
Now we’re on the subject of housing, I should note that our methods of housing development are mismanaged in the same way. The approach is to deforest a vast swathe, or better yet, get one’s hands on former farmland. Then the construction company strips away the healthy topsoil to sell for its agricultural value. These housing developments, called “subdivisions” out here in Ontario, are not only urban-design nightmares, they kill the soil by clearing out the microbial and mycorrhizal life, compacting the ground, excavating water tables, laying down thirsty sod everywhere, and dowsing it all with lawncare poison.
There are ways to restore soil health. We know which practices destroy the soil, and we know which practices restore it. So long as we continue industrial, monocultural farming, mindless deforestation, and clueless housing development, we’re not going to resolve the issue. So when local government committees come along and start up some inane project to study and investigate and set up a database and start scientiphysizing about it, you ought to raise an eyebrow because it’s just boondoggle and prestidigitation distracting from our lack of responsible land stewardship. We need to rethink our economy and how we live, especially with respect to the role of food at the local level. Bill Mollison pointed out that if only 10% of us switched from being consumers to producers, there’d be enough food for everyone.
Asa Boxer’s poetry has garnered several prizes and is included in various anthologies around the world. His books are The Mechanical Bird (Signal, 2007), Skullduggery (Signal, 2011), Friar Biard’s Primer to the New World (Frog Hollow Press, 2013), Etymologies (Anstruther Press, 2016), Field Notes from the Undead (Interludes Press, 2018), and The Narrow Cabinet: A Zombie Chronicle (Guernica, 2022). Boxer is also a founder of and editor at analogy magazine.
I think I see a ("the"?) problem here.
Short preface - every process (sandpile, road system, human city) faces scale issues. Usually we see this in terms of 'space' ("Oh my, where DO i put all this stuff?") and things like landslides, congestion, and ecosystem exhaustion. ("Move West, young man, and find that sweet, sweet, topsoil!")
But scale can be in terms of time, too - and as our lovely Screen Kultcha drags us ever-closer to a 5 second dopamine-soaked attention span (median American barely reads a book a year, but "I luv me some good TikTube and FaceGram!"), the solutions to our challenges require longer-term thinking. Like Permaculture, for one.
Upshot: I can't see these *great* solutions being successfully and broadly implemented until we break through the 5 second, high time preference, short horizon "singularity" we are "accelerating" towards...
(I agree w/ Pirsig -- a partial collapse, racheting down a level...or two...(cf. "Lila") followed by a long dormant period, and rebuilding. "Paging Dr. Hari Seldon, Trantor courtesy phone...paging Dr. Seldon...")
I loved reading your essay on soil health and will make sure my farmer brother and his son both see it. Back in the 1950s my father was among the first Iowa farmers to experiment with contour planting and plowing--planting and plowing in curves around hills rather than in straight rows that allowed soil erosion. At the time nobody thought about conservation, but soil conversation became a big thing through country groups called "extension" offices--extending, I believe now, ideas from universities to farmers and farms. Farming has moved on, of course, satellites, chemicals, and so on. My father never finished high school, which not unusual in rural areas then (he was born in 1910), but we were proud to know that he was on the front lines, so to speak, of new farming methods.