Can we update Civilization?
July 4th thoughts on America’s drought solution:
rich soils, intact vegetation, wild ecosystems.
It’s July 4th weekend, the holiday commemorating perhaps the bravest event in American history…so far.
So let’s get real, let’s reboot our mental model of what’s happening today and how to live. America’s extreme drought is worsening, temperatures are rising, summer’s just getting started.
It was 114 in Northern Washington Wednesday, 121 in Canada. Already this year:
- About 1/4 of North America is in extreme drought.
- More than 1/2 of Asia and Africa: extreme drought.
- Significant portions of the Amazon, South America, the Congo, Australia, Europe: extreme drought.
What on Earth do we do?
- Protect intact ecosystems.
- Regrow intact ecosystems.
- Buffer-up soils, vegetation and ecosystems.
Ecosytems are our life-support system.
Consider this — Life on Earth has adapted to and recovered from much greater extremes than today’s radical warming. The life that precedes us is incredibly intelligent. Remember the snow-pocalypse in Texas in February? Here’s a timeline showing the history of temperatures and modern forests on Earth.
The first modern forests appeared over 100 Million Years ago. They’ve adapted to temperature extremes more than 10X hotter than today’s warming and to cooling about 9X colder than the temperate climate we currently depend on.
How did they do it? What’s the difference? No human interference. Humanity’s challenge today begins with seeing the value of vegetation, soils, and wildlife — the wilderness continuum, and valuing and investing in regrowth of Earth’s wilderness continuum. This is our most comprehensive solution.
Yes, reduce greenhouse emissions with better technologies, but that won’t be enough. Like your body’s organs, ecosystems require intactness to manage temperature extremes, and intact ecosystems are our best allies in stopping and reversing climate change, absorbing and holding carbon and water, circulating both, and thereby cooling our planet.
Consider this image:
Vegetation, soils, all life…is made of carbon and water. Life is MADE to capture, hold on to and circulate water. Just like your body.
Every vegetative organism will grab and hold onto moisture for as long as it can. Metals can’t do this. Concrete can’t do this. Technologies can’t do this at scale.
And moisture cools. Moisture irrigates. Irrigation = more carbon absorption = more moisture absorption = more circulation = more cooling.
At macro-scale land-based ecosystems are sponges in varying states. Just as we utilize modern plumbing to drink and circulate water, land-based ecosystems utilize their media (leafy matter, soil micro-organisms, trunks, detritus and stems) to do the same: drink, hold, circulate, irrigate, cool.
Here is a model:
So, it’s time to get going. It’s time to value the infrastructure of the life-support system we’ve so recently fragmented and destroyed. It’s time to de-fragment the wild world, to rescue ourselves by regrowing Earth’s wilderness integrity, to take all of the biological materials we throw into landfills every day and buffer-up and enhance our soils (like San Francisco); to rebuild Earth’s biospheric integrity. This is priority one in the developed world.
What can you do?
A lot.
More about this in the weeks ahead but here are a few key ideas:
- Compost
- Don’t mow
- Regrow, Rewild
- Revegetate & Integrate
- Observe & consider biospheric reality.
The sponge is our greatest asset for managing heat domes, extreme cold, droughts, floods and more. The vegetation all around us, and without question Earth’s natural soils, are more than ready for the these challenges. They’ve been adapting for 100s of millions to billions of years.
It’s time we recognize their intelligence; their extreme adapatability. It’s in their history. It’s in their DNA. They don’t need technology. They need us to get out of their way.
It’s time to change our mental model of what priorities come first in the climate solution for the developed world, i.e.: intact, rich, wild, connected ecosystems.
