Can You Stabilize Climate?
I don’t know about you, but I don’t have the capability to stabilize climate on a grand scale (so far beyond 55 acres). I can’t add appropriate levels of organic nutrition to the ocean where needed and at the right time. Like you, I also don’t have the time to guide wild deer and elk populations away from overeating young forests before saplings have a chance to regenerate. (I can specify deer-resistant buffer zones, but that’s another story.)
It turns out, science is beginning to come to an understanding of the ecological value of endangered species like whales and wolves in protecting all of us from problems that affect our health and quality of life.
As a Permaculture designer, I work to stabilize climate and restore and protect the inherent power of the land to sustain life. I have for over a decade advised clients to work with Nature in ways that reduce their need for costly inputs while living on and managing urban, suburban, and rural properties.
I teach people to employ what I call “fulcrum moves,” the type of straight-forward steps that reduce costs and effort while increasing benefits. Fulcrum moves make projects go better, help plants flower more, and result in more delicious fruit. They also add to the health of the larger ecosystem from the local level.
But what if we could get someone else to stabilize climate for us?
Small, Smart Steps To Stabilize Climate
I have seen over the years that small, smart inputs tend to have a jump-start impact on restoring degraded land. I have seen with my own eyes that with the right moves, the landscape literally takes over from where intelligent human hands leave off. And it happens fast. It’s almost as if Earth is waiting for humankind to get in the game. But that’s another blog article. The key thing here is that the land itself takes this help and restarts its journey towards Climax Ecosystem. A climax ecosystem will naturally stabilize climate.
A climax ecosystem is a landscape operating at peak function. It is resilient, effective, efficient, and abundant. It houses a multitude of diverse life forms. It supports life in balance, feeds and quenches all players, shades and shines in the right places, provides homes for thick layers of living things.
It purifies water for drinking, filters harsh sunlight to protect skin from radiation, pumps out fresh oxygen for all to breathe. The path underfoot is soft and resilient, and shelter is abundant.
But there is a myth circulating that a thing called entropy, a decline and dissipation without human input, is the natural movement of all systems; however, the truth is that all natural systems move effortlessly toward a climax state unless they are disturbed.
What does this have to do with stabilizing global climate?
I have realized in my over 12 years of professional service as a landscape designer that every small thing human beings do to restore natural systems makes life easier and more beautiful and healthy. Not just for wild creatures, but for us as well.
Many times I have added food and forage plants to degraded sites, and even before my shovel has broken the earth, pollinating insects and birds show up to drink nectar from these plants. Visiting birds, butterflies, bees, and dragonflies make most people express delight, and I’ve just never heard of anyone speaking with dismay after seeing a hummingbird visit a nearby flower. Maybe such people are hiding from such experiences in towers of glass and steel?
I can just see some corporation claiming it can create a kind of machine or chemical process that simulates the action of the great whales, thereby rendering these creatures “unnecessary.”
Maybe it surprises you as much as it does me how often that kind of argument is taken seriously in the “global conversation” on such matters? But the value of critically endangered beings, if the issue can be reduced to such levels, isn’t just in their ecosystem function. Things they naturally do that stabilize climate and enrich, and in many cases provide, life to other beings – none of us can perform as well as they. This value I am talking about, above and beyond their unalienable rights as sentient beings to live life on this Earth like us, is in the fantastic miracle of the way that they live.
A Living Miracle
The miracle is that living groups of creatures affect the global ecosystem and protect all other lifeforms with their own life activities.
Talk about awesome!
And these amazing fellow denizens of Earth do so in harmonious, balanced, efficient, and graceful ways, too, as if they are having fun. Maybe they are.
Their ways take major problems out of our hands and solve them for us without our having to lift a finger.*
Things like food stability, forest regeneration, organic fertilization, topsoil retention, and balanced resource utilization are just some of the functions offered to the world by such creatures.
If we allow the work of stabilizing global climate to be carried out by these fellow sentient beings in their masterful style, we might hang a hammock and breathe a little. (While we still have the chance!)
It makes no sense to sit back and allow such master stewards of our planet to be destroyed by unsustainable and unfounded practices.
What To Do?
I’d like to ask each and every person who may happen upon this article if you like having good weather and enough food to eat.
*If so, please consider taking action to protect and restore the whales, wolves, and countless other species of living organisms helping to sustain YOUR quality of life, before it is too late.
Write, call, and/or email your elected officials TODAY.
It’s easy! You don’t need bullet points. They actually wait to hear from their constituents on all manner of issues, and respectful heartfelt words have power.
Trust me, I’ve spoken with many of them over the years; plus, it’s the law!
Remember, each citizen letter written by hand and put through regular mail is counted 2000 times.
For All Life On Earth – Mitakuye Oasin! (All my relations.)
