Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
The word ‘rewilding’ has had its day and now needs to slip gracefully into retirement. That, at any rate, is the polite suggestion I’m going to make in this post, which is the last in my recent mini-series on ‘wrecked’ land and what to do about it.
The world’s love of carrots and the importance of color in different societies and food cultures means the many traditional varieties grown for centuries will continue to thrive alongside modern cultivars, which are the product of sophisticated modern plant breeding techniques.
In this last in my series of nitrogen articles, I turn to the question if we can do without synthetic nitrogen fertilizers.
The way that humans have messed with the Earth’s carbon cycle rightly figures as planetary eco-problem No.1 in public debate, but the way we’ve messed with its nitrogen cycle probably ought to get more attention than it does.
Investing in a small family farm is much more than an economic consideration: it can help to revitalise an entire village. Rural communities are rooted in multi-generational family farms.
As climate change proceeds apace, more and more cities will face serious water shortages. Will they be able to cope?
There is now realisation that we must now develop “an economy that is in service of the web of life …”, this recent statement by Prof Nathalie Seddon, in discussing the role of Nature Based Solutions is very pertinent to municipal water services, and much else.
Soils and human health are both very complex systems and the systems are dynamic, which means that it is very difficult to establish a direct causality between the use of nitrogen and any, positive or negative, effects on human health.
Making too big a deal about the specific commodity in a given place – such as sheep in upland Wales – risks missing the bigger picture of a general overproduction in the global agricultural and wider economy. But if we really want to name the culprits in these wider economies, pride of place would have to go to fossil fuels, cereal grains and grain legumes.
In his highly readable book, Frerick describes the businesses of barons who dominate seven sectors of the US food industry. In the process he illuminates much in recent American history and goes a long way towards diagnosing environmental ills, socio-economic ills, and the ill health of so many food consumers.
A more than hundred year old focus on easily available nutrients has led farming astray. Instead, nutrient availability is to a large extent an emergent property of healthy soils.
An advantage of the transition to agrarian localism is that it depends very little on new technologies, and almost entirely on politics – hence my subtitle for this post.
