At Litha, the summer solstice, the sun is at its highest point in the sky, and we benefit from its uplifting rays for longer during the day.
Ancient civilisations worshipped it. All life on earth depends on it. Regenerative agriculturalists consider themselves farmers of it. And human mitochondria can potentially be powered by it!
The concept of sun worship (or worship of the light that comes from the sun) is as old as humanity itself, so why have we turned our back on sunlight in recent years?
In many Native American cultures, the sun was recognised as providing a life-giving force. Many plains tribes still perform a sundance every year, which is seen as the bond people have with the earth and the growing season.
In ancient Egypt, the sun god, Ra, was the ruler of the heavens and the patron of the pharos.
In ancient Greece, Helios, who gave light to both gods and men, was celebrated each year with an impressive ritual that involved a giant chariot pulled by four horses being driven off the end of a cliff and into the sea!
Now, although sending a team of horses plummeting to their death is perhaps taking things a bit too far, I have, in recent years, grown to appreciate why our ancestors so revered the light from that glowing orb in the sky.
In regenerative agriculture, optimising photosynthesis is considered the biggest opportunity to turn a land base into a profitable and productive enterprise.
If you think of a plant as a photosynthetic organism instead of simply something that grows and you harvest or graze, then everything changes. Plants take up CO2 and utilise water and nutrients from the soil to turn sunlight into food and cellular structure. The plants’ leaves are the photosynthetic panels that create the energy they need to feed themselves and grow.
In grass plants, a general rule of thumb is; ‘what grows above represents what grows below.’ In other words, if the plant is 6 inches high, the roots will be 6 inches deep.
If a grass plant is grazed down to 50% of a fully recovered height, it generally doesn’t lose too many roots and can be ready to mobilise nutrients for rapid re-growth. However, if it is taken lower than degrees, the plant sheds its roots to rebalance its energy needs and so takes a lot longer to regrow as it has to re-establish its roots in order to regrow its leaves.
As a simple rule of thumb, we regenerative farmers try not to graze grass plants below 50% of a fully recovered height; we use long recovery periods and shorter grazing periods to optimise solar energy flow – the powerhouse of plant production. We aim to encourage a diversity of plants and a tall grazing height to increase the rate and capacity of photosynthesis throughout the seasons. By optimising photosynthesis, we can increase livestock whilst hopefully reducing our environmentally and financially costly inputs.
In ecology, we are very familiar with the concept of primary production. The conversion of sunlight ultimately controls the potential for both diversity and population size of all other species. If we don’t increase the base rate of sunlight conversion at the grass level, we cannot increase the numbers of or diversity of species or those of the predators that rely upon the herbivores aconverting the sunlight into food.
So, all species benefit from and rely upon solar energy. One species, however, has developed an aversion to the sun – humans!
During the period in human history when we suppressed pagan beliefs in favour of Christianity, we too inadvertently suppressed our love of the sun.
William Tyler Occlatt wrote;
“Nothing proves so much the antiquity of solar idolatry as the care Moses took to prohibit it. “Take care,” said he to the Israelites, “lest when you lift up your eyes to Heaven and see the sun, the moon, and all the stars, you be seduced and drawn away to pay worship and adoration to the creatures which the Lord your God has made for the service of all the nations under Heaven.”
Then over the last couple of decades, something more persuasive than the best Christian missionaries convinced us the sun was dangerous – sunscreen marketers!
I have always felt better when the sun is shining. Over the years, my family and I have enjoyed the feeling of having our skin exposed to the sun; I think people look healthier when they sport a warm brown skin tone.
Fast forward a couple of decades of dedicated sunscreen marketing and ‘health’ warnings about the dangers of the sun, and we have a different story.
Today, allowing your kids to get a tan has become as unacceptable as giving them a spanking on the street! A more common, socially accepted scene is the frantic mother smothering her ‘wee one’ in thick layers of protective goop before being unleashed from the car.
It turns out, slathering your children in sunscreen comes with its own dangers.
A recent study published in the peer-reviewed medical journal JAMA found that several potentially highly toxic ingredients in different sunscreens enter the bloodstream at levels that far exceed the FDA’s recommended threshold without a government safety inspection. 1
To avoid this issue, you could use one of the more natural and organic sunscreens available – I use an aloe vera brand for when I am outdoors all day. But is the sun the cancer causing danger we have been led to believe? Perhaps not. In fact, studies show that avoiding the sun actually carries significant health risks too. 2
Vitamin D is critical for human health and can be made in our body when sunlight hits the skin.
Vitamin D is one of the super vitamins that:
- helps our bone and teeth health
- bolsters our immune system
- regulates insulin
- and benefits our cardiovascular system.
In the western world, we are suffering from an epidemic of vitamin D deficiency – as many as 13% of deaths could be attributed to a lack of this essential vitamin! 3
The authors of a new study in the journal of internal medicine concluded that, based on their results, avoiding the sun carries a ‘risk factor for death of a similar magnitude as smoking.’
‘’Noted vitamin D researcher Michael Holick, MD, PhD, warned almost a decade ago that avoiding sun exposure to prevent skin cancer results in such a drop in vitamin D levels that for every life saved from skin cancer over 100 people will lose their lives to other forms of cancer most notably prostate, breast and colon cancer.’’ 4 5
These may be indirect effects but are pretty serious all the same, and it may not just be the vitamin D that powers the health benefits of the sun.
Gerald Pollack’s fascinating book ‘the fourth phase of water’ introduces us to so-called ‘EZ (exclusion zone)’ or ‘structured’ water. Structured water not only gives us clues about how water gets from the bottom of a tree to the top, but some researchers believe that sunlight could directly increase our health and energy levels. These researchers propose that sunlight changes the structure of water, negatively charging the water in your cells. This infrared energy boost activates the cells and improves mitochondrial function!
More on this in our upcoming ‘water’ article. 6 7
So maybe we should be worshipping the sun after all!
It’s never sensible to allow your skin to burn, but peeling back the layers and exposing as much of your skin as possible without sunscreen for an hour or two a day seems like it could be a great addition to your primal health regimen.
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