Climate and environmental issues are more than just CO2.
Our urgent environmental issues are too important to be hijacked by reductionist solutions and exploited by corporations.
By Caroline Grindrod
Contents Page
Real World Science
Plants are Holobionts
Incomplete Study of Life
Living Systems Paradigm
War Mentality not Appropriate
Waging War on Carbon
Pattern of Destruction
Addressing root causes
The Dangers of Human Ignorance
Carbon – The Currency of Life
Earth as a Living System
Regenerate Earth
Help us create solutions – Join the Primal Stakes Club
Real World Science
Looking at anything through a single lens gives you a distorted and often partial view of reality.
Let’s take the example of plant nutrition and soil science;
For years scientists studied crop plants and grasses in laboratories in sterilised soil to ensure no variables would give false results.
They developed the scientific understanding of how plants take up nutrients and how soils function to an exceptional level – this requires deep expertise in physical and chemical soil interactions.
Based on this understanding, crop scientists have bred plants to become more and more efficient and specialised so they can grow optimally with artificial soluble nutrient inputs – we are reaching peak production from this ‘green revolution’ that relies upon cheap fossil fuels and synthetic fertilisers.
Unfortunately, they missed a major fact. In Nature plants actually don’t grow in labs in dead soil! In the field, they grow in soil that is a whole living system (1).
Plants don’t take up nutrients like we thought – essentially sucking them up from the soil solution through their roots like a straw and using some weak acids to release nutrients.
Plants are Holobionts
A holobiont is an assemblage of a host and the many other species living in or around it, which together form a discrete ecological unit through symbiosis.
In nature, plants form symbiotic relationships with soil organisms to obtain a wide range of nutrients. Organisms can release elements from the rock that plants cannot directly access and exchange them for sugary liquid carbon exudates provided by healthy plants through their roots (2).
When this ‘microbial bridge’ works optimally, plants never really need external nutrients and never run short of food, obtaining a far wider range of essential elements than could ever be available in the soluble pool (3).
In really healthy soils, plants and soils are part of a huge communication web of common Mycorrhizal fungi networks that help plants exchange nutrients and chemical signals and explore more soil volume for water. They make the ‘whole’ plant and soil system greater than the sum of its parts (4).
A plant grown in isolation will only obtain a tiny fraction of the nutrients that the same plant species will take up if grown in a system of twenty other species of plants. This is because the combination of all the plants working together builds a healthy soil system that can release nutrients from the rock and buffer them for future use (5).
It’s a case of 1 + 1 = 10. Something that can never be quantified and understood from studying each part of that system in isolation.
Incomplete Study of Life
How we have been studying plants could be likened to studying human digestion by only looking at the stomach and ignoring the function of the gut! The soil organisms are the gut of the plant, and these organisms don’t survive the sterilisation process involved in laboratory studies.
Most of the last 50 years of agricultural advancements were based on this partial view of a far more complex reality. We developed plant breeds that thrive in dead soil and rely upon artificial fertiliser. We developed animal breeds that thrive upon the plants that thrive in dead soil. We have designed our whole farming systems – the machinery, the sheds, the feeds, the fertilisers – on this premise. We have got really good at this!
This type of farming system, however, is vulnerable and highly reliant on fossil fuel inputs – it degrades living soils so farms become increasingly reliant on expensive artificial inputs, leading to them losing profitability as input prices skyrocket (6,7).
Just think of how far we could have advanced genuinely sustainable farming and feeding a hungry world if the last 50 years of agronomic science had been built on the foundation of understanding that plants and living soil were one system!
Living Systems
Require a different view
Living systems like soil, plants, ecosystems and the ecosphere are complex self-organising systems and cannot be understood by mechanistic thinking and reductionist science. The consequences of jumping to conclusions and taking responses with only a partial understanding of a complex system can set you back decades and even take you in the opposite direction of what is required.
And make no mistake. We are on the precipice of the next catastrophic, time-wasting blunder.
We are making the assumption that the complex and devastating environmental problems we face – including biodiversity loss, desertification, massive uncontrollable wildfires, sea acidification, climate derangement and warming can all be explained by the greenhouse effect (8).
And, of course, the simple solution is that we can solve all of this by reducing CO2 emissions. It’s just a simple matter of maths. Units of greenhouse gases (mainly carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide) can be converted into CO2 equivalents – and our job is to emit less and sequester (remove and lock up) more.
This handy dandy accounting exercise also conveniently means that the corporate giants who have been merrily extracting – or relying upon the extraction of – fossil fuels to dominate the world can carry on business as usual by buying credits. They are the ones that can afford to, after all(9,10)!
Rolling the problem of dealing with ecological destruction down the road for future generations to sort out the mess!
War Mentality Not Appropriate
With this simplistic carbon accounting system, we are yet again taking a partial view of a complex whole living planetary system – the ecosphere. Yes, CO2 is causing warming through the greenhouse effect, but that’s only a small piece of a far more giant climate puzzle.
As Charles Eisenstein explains in his superb book ‘climate – A new story, we are a society that has been trained to reduce everything to a single problem with a simple response so that we can wage war upon it (11).
And rather than understand that there are many interconnected root causes, we try to simplify problems to one single reason that we can fight…..
We have waged war on carbon!
‘’But time is running out; this is an urgent emergency!’’ I hear you say!
Yes, it is. And that’s even more reason to ensure we take a systems view and address the root causes of these wicked, complex and interrelated problems instead of jumping to knee-jerk simplistic responses that take us precisely in the wrong direction (12).
This sort of time-wasting error could lead to a scenario such as the one played out in the film ‘don’t look up’ where the experts and political parties are so hell-bent on proving each other wrong and ensuring they can all profit from the impending disaster that they fail to avert the tragedy and the planet is destroyed! This is playing out in front of our very eyes.
Divisive mouthpieces such as George Monbiot abuse their positions of influence by confusing the public into inertia.
They inadvertently – let’s give him the benefit of the doubt – play into what I call the ‘pattern of destruction’, which is the playbook of the big corporations currently dominating and influencing our world for their own benefit (13).
The Pattern of Destruction
The pattern of destruction looks something like this:
Addressing Root Causes Instead
We want to be able to attribute all of the problems of our world to carbon so we don’t have to worry about dealing with the complex issues of unpicking and understanding these wicked interrelated problems.
We can all jump on the ‘carbon fundamentalism’ bandwagon and hope that reducing CO2 in the atmosphere will solve everything. We can give it a number, create a budget and track our linear progress with measurable and predictable steps.
And don’t dare you to question this simplified war narrative, or you will be branded a heretic – a climate denier!
It’s never a single problem, and wars never resolve the root cause of systemic problems. Solutions that rely upon more and more separation from nature – such as lab-grown meat and smart cities – are a terrible idea and can only lead to further separation, devaluing nature, and more mechanistic thinking.
The ways that we are disrupting Earth go way way beyond some linear temperature change metric driven by CO2.
We are degrading land at the rate of an area half the size of the European Union every year (14,15).
Some estimates suggest that 133bn tonnes of carbon, or 8% of total global soil carbon stocks, may have been lost from the top two metres of the world’s soil and added to the CO2 load in the atmosphere since the dawn of agriculture 12,000 years ago (16).
We have disrupted rainfall patterns by creating vast man-made heat domes through deliberate chemical bare fallow and degraded bare soils that repel rainfall and intensify drought (17).
We have billions of acres of oxidising plants fueling wildfires due to dysfunctional water cycles and a collapse of natural functions (19,20).
We have lost biodiversity at a terrifying rate and are witnessing the complete collapse of insect life on our planet from simplifying ecosystems into conventionally managed farmland (21,22).
The Dangers of Human Ignorance
Of course, there’s a greenhouse effect, and CO2 should be minimised, but it’s not the only thing warming and disrupting the planet. 95% of the heat dynamics of the planet is governed by water, but we can’t easily model or measure that, so it is essentially ignored – it’s ‘‘carbon washed’ over! (23,24,25)
What if we put all our energy into CO2 mitigation strategies, which drive us towards decisions that worsen things?
An example would be a switch from an omnivorous diet to a plant-based diet on a global scale.
In our CO2 spreadsheet, it might make complete sense. But if we increase demand for plants and these are grown using a conventional agriculture approach, we could create millions more acres of dead, bare, hot re-radiating soil, remove more habitats, crash biodiversity further, create heat domes that further disrupt water cycles, lose millions more small independent farms and totally undermine food security (26).
CO2 emissions have become synonymous with ‘environmental’, so now, when you are referring to a farm being environmentally friendly, it is assumed you mean it is net zero. A farm can be net zero but could still be an ecological dead zone, mistreating its animals, paying its staff poorly, having suicidal owners who are losing money and producing poor-quality food!
There is an unfortunate consequence of silencing and cancelling anyone who disagrees with the dominant narrative on climate – apart from the lack of progressive healthy nuanced scientific debate – it slows positive action. People see through the simplistic greenwash then swing to the opposite view – ‘’there’s no human-induced climate change, it’s all corporate lies – let’s just carry on with our extractive lifestyles’’. It drives apathy, inaction and resistance.
‘We must remember that when animals are part of a whole system, carbon is simply the currency of life’
Caroline Grindrod, Roots of Nature
Carbon – The Currency of Life
The other unfortunate outcome of this carbon tunnel vision is that instead of money and science being directed to improving the natural cooling capacities of the planet, it’s focused on CO2 reduction, for example, using seaweed and manufactured additives and genetically selecting animals with lower emissions.
We must remember that when animals are part of a whole system, carbon is simply the currency of life (27).
Plants take it out of the atmosphere, animals eat it and release it, and then it is oxidised out through a range of chemical reactions back to CO2 to be taken up again by plants and sequestered into the soil (28, 29).
The problem only arises when you study the cow out of its environment (or the cow is decoupled from its environment and reared in an intensive system). Just like the plant studied with a partial view in a lab leads us down a destructive path by creating crops relying on damaging extractive fertiliser and genetically selected to be less able to find their nutrients naturally. We could shape our farming efforts in ways that undermine our long-term resilience and further harm biodiversity.
We could see more cattle in sheds that are selected for low methane but only do well on fortified refined grains (30), which are grown using soil-damaging practices. Or a mass shift in land use to monoculture plantations that sequester the most CO2 and therefore pay the best carbon credit returns to landowners at the expense of rare species and complex irreplaceable old habitats (31).
Studying a cow as a separate ‘machine’ that somehow belches out methane which is counted in our climate spreadsheet, without accounting for the carbon it takes up in grass and cycles in excretions is badly misrepresenting the situation (32).
Ffinlo Costain explains the importance of thinking of cattle as part of a ‘whole system’ in his fantastic TED talk – please watch below.
Earth as a Living System
The climate issue has been hijacked by powerful corporate players who will turn the situation to their advantage and, in the process, potentially leave us in a worse climate predicament than before.
Don’t fall for it.
What if climate change is really happening because the earth is a living system, and her tissues and organs have been badly damaged? Earth can no longer cool herself and is running a fever. Instead of stopping further damage and putting her into a healing rehabilitation program, we are just developing smarter and smarter drugs to mask the pain and reduce the fever.
Regenerate Earth
I agree quantifying and reducing GHG emissions is essential and a good step for companies looking to reduce their impact, but it must come as part of a holistic package of measures that includes achieving wider social and environmental outcomes such as rebuilding healthy soil, enhancing water cycles, restoring locally appropriate biodiversity, re-building resilient supply chains and improving the lives of people.
We must encourage nuanced debate and holistic responses such as this one outlined by ‘regenerate earth’ that addresses the climate as a whole system. Read here (33).
It’s not enough to be aware of the exploitation of our environmental predicament. We truly need to create viable, interdependent, complex and holistic solutions. That’s what the team behind Primal Meats is doing through offering programs that support the redesign and transition of farms to regenerative ‘whole’ systems.
These programs – such as Wilderculture and Roots of Nature – are designed to be socially, ecologically and economically balanced in ways that are tailored to the uniqueness of people and place.
This approach is the best way to address the root causes of climate change rapidly and at scale.
Please support our work in transitioning more farms to this approach by signing up to our Primal Stakes Club.
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References:
- https://www.ecofarmingdaily.com/interview-sos-save-soils-dr-christine-jones-explains-life-giving-link-carbon-healthy-topsoil/
- https://www.soilfoodweb.com/how-it-works/
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x2H60ritjag
- https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4802747/
- https://the-jena-experiment.de/index.php/videos/
- https://lordslibrary.parliament.uk/rising-cost-of-agricultural-fertiliser-and-feed-causes-impacts-and-government-policy/
- https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-devon-61992224
- https://climate.nasa.gov/faq/19/what-is-the-greenhouse-effect/
- https://www.independent.co.uk/climate-change/news/kristalina-georgieva-imf-yara-british-bank-of-england-b2377740.html
- https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/feb/09/profits-energy-fossil-fuel-resurgence-climate-crisis-shell-exxon-bp-chevron-totalenergies#:~:text=While%202022%20inflicted%20hardship%20upon,combined%20%24200bn%20in%20profits.
- https://www.google.com/search?rlz=1C5MACD_enGB1067&sxsrf=AB5stBg3rPW11z5LGzuj48hEIsxbSI6IKw:1690202601851&q=charles+eisenstein+climate&tbm=vid&source=lnms&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiJ1Lmtr6eAAxWJtKQKHRQvB3QQ0pQJegQIDBAB&biw=1512&bih=860&dpr=2#fpstate=ive&vld=cid:0d3b91ab,vid:DYQKLrbiCDE
- https://youtu.be/Ldza3txPNTA
- https://rootsofnature.co.uk/patterns-of-destruction/
- https://www.primalmeats.co.uk/why-a-meat-tax-will-lead-to-faster-climate-breakdown/
- https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/article/desertification
- Sanderman et al, Feb 2018
- https://youtu.be/w0cGRKwP9W8
- https://youtu.be/aZDkwWA8iB8
- https://youtu.be/755ChlpDOpU
- https://www.euronews.com/green/2021/12/08/wildfires-emitted-1-76-billion-tonnes-of-carbon-this-year-breaking-records
- https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/feb/24/ecosystem-collapse-wildlife-losses-permian-triassic-mass-extinction-study#:~:text=The%20steady%20destruction%20of%20wildlife,of%20a%20new%20mass%20extinction.
- https://ec.europa.eu/research-and-innovation/en/horizon-magazine/sixth-mass-extinction-could-destroy-life-we-know-it-biodiversity-expert
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6VHMeO-1X0c&t=7s
- https://youtu.be/fOyBJ88Pbhk
- https://youtu.be/jwEToq05L2k
- https://www.foodandsecurity.net/_files/ugd/0f4d79_7291a83f21fa4c558927a767997825f8.pdf
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ijxo1xJVEr0&t=1s
- https://lachefnet.wordpress.com/2018/05/04/ruminations-methane-math-and-context/
- https://lachefnet.wordpress.com/2023/05/28/the-methane-chronicles-plus-why-you-cant-discuss-methane-without-discussing-hydroxyl-radicals/
- https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1751731121001373
- https://policy.friendsoftheearth.uk/insight/dangerous-distraction-offsetting-con
- https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0308521X17310338
- https://www.regenerate-earth.org/regenerate-earth-walter-jehne
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