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A Climate Solution is in the Soil
With the worsening crises in public health, biodiversity, and global warming, the future can look bleak. Fortunately, there’s a solution: regenerative food, farming, and land use.
Regenerative agriculture, when scaled up and combined with reforestation and other regenerative land use practices, has the potential to generate a net decrease in atmospheric carbon. How? By allowing photosynthesis to do its job. Carbon drawn from the atmosphere by living plants helps build soil organic matter. When soil organic matter is disturbed or destroyed, the carbon is released back into the atmosphere where it contributes to global warming. Regenerative farming practices help preserve and build soil organic matter, so the carbon drawn down through photosynthesis remains sequestered in the soil.
If regenerative practices are implemented on enough land, we’ll reach zero net emissions by 2030 and begin to reverse global warming. Transitioning to regenerative agriculture will also produce healthier food, build soil fertility, restore depleted groundwater, and build local resilience and food security. Regenerative agriculture is a way forward to restore the health of people and the planet.
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Corporate lobbyists have no shame. Neither does Congress. Or the Trump administration.
They’re using the coronavirus pandemic as an excuse to shovel taxpayer dollars into corporate coffers and break laws meant to protect human health and the environment.
TAKE ACTION: Tell Congress: COVID-19 relief should be a #JustRecovery!
When the Green New Deal was introduced last year, many members of Congress refused to support it because they said we couldn’t possibly afford it.
Now, suddenly Congress has found $2 trillion for the Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security (CARES) Act, a stimulus bill chock full of bailouts for corporate criminals.
If we don’t put guardrails on its use, this money is gone. We won’t get another chance to fund a just transition to the net-zero-carbon economy we need—by 2030—to avert the worst impacts of climate change.
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COVID-19 has now violently emerged, alongside the Climate Emergency, as an existential threat. Our health, economic livelihoods, climate stability, democracy—our very survival as a human species—are under attack.
If we’re going to survive this pandemic, and avoid the pandemics lying in wait, if we’re going to avoid the greatest pandemic of them all looming on the horizon—runaway global warming and catastrophic climate change—we need to take control of our destiny and build a new Green Commonwealth that is regenerative, rather than degenerative.
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The frightening COVID-19 pandemic, slowly but surely infecting millions, fueling an economic and political meltdown and metastasizing in the midst of a global Climate Emergency, has pushed a critical mass of us all to the brink.
Words can barely convey our waking nightmare, or fully expose the cabal of monsters and the degenerate “business-as-usual” practices that have brought on this disaster. Like a horror movie rerun, every night I wake up.
How did we ever let this happen? What can we do to protect ourselves and others? Can we rise to the occasion and organize a massive Grassroots Rising, head off disaster, and take advantage of this tragic “trigger moment”?
Can we deal with the degenerative practices that have unleashed this mega-crisis and bring to heel the perpetrators, the greedy elite who created and/or abetted this catastrophe?
As an international chorus of climate, environmental and political leaders warned this week, it’s now or never “to harness our fears, build hope and drive action to respond to the human health, economic, climate and biodiversity crisis with solutions that build resilient societies on the longer term.”
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RECOMMENDED BOOKS
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This book tackles an increasingly crucial question: What can we do about the seemingly intractable challenges confronting all of humanity today, including climate change, global hunger, water scarcity, environmental stress, and economic instability? The quick answers are: Build topsoil. Fix creeks. Eat meat from pasture-raised animals. -
In Soil Not Oil, Vandana Shiva explains that a world beyond dependence on fossil fuels and globalization is both possible and necessary. Condemning industrial agriculture as a recipe for ecological and economic disaster, Shiva champions the small, independent farm: their greater productivity, their greater potential for social justice as they put more resources into the hands of the poor, and the biodiversity that is inherent to the traditional farming practiced in small-scale agriculture. -
In The Soil Will Save Us, journalist and bestselling author Kristin Ohlson makes an elegantly argued, passionate case for "our great green hope"—a way in which we can not only heal the land but also turn atmospheric carbon into beneficial soil carbon—and potentially reverse global warming. -
The climate change challenge is real, and it is here now. To enjoy the sustained production of food, fiber and fuel well into the 21st century, we must begin now to make changes that will enhance the adaptive capacity and resilience of North American agriculture. The rich knowledge base presented in Resilient Agriculture is poised to serve as the cornerstone of an evolving, climate-ready food system. -
Two Percent Solutions for the Planet profiles fifty innovative practices that soak up carbon dioxide in soils, reduce energy use, sustainably intensify food production, and increase water quality. The “two percent” refers to: the amount of new carbon in the soil needed to reap a wide variety of ecological and economic benefits; the percentage of the nation’s population who are farmers and ranchers; and the low financial cost (in terms of GDP) needed to get this work done. -
Around the globe most people get their calories from “annual” agriculture — plants that grow fast for one season, produce lots of seeds, then die. Every single human society that has relied on annual crops for staple foods has collapsed. Restoration Agriculture explains how we can have all of the benefits of natural, perennial ecosystems and create agricultural systems that imitate nature in form and function while still providing for our food, building, fuel and many other needs — in your own backyard, farm or ranch. -
In Cows Save the Planet, journalist Judith D. Schwartz looks at soil as a crucible for our many overlapping environmental, economic, and social crises. Schwartz reveals that for many of these problems—climate change, desertification, biodiversity loss, droughts, floods, wildfires, rural poverty, malnutrition, and obesity—there are positive, alternative scenarios to the degradation and devastation we face. In each case, our ability to turn these crises into opportunities depends on how we treat the soil.
