Beyond Mitigation
How the lingering vestiges of Reductionism keep us from real environmental solutions.
As a kid, I was mesmerized by the idea that space was not flat and time was relative. I devoured stories by Ursula K. Le Guin and Orson Scott Card, whose characters had to wrestle with the implications of space travel at speeds that left individuals to age at different rates. I wanted to know how a tesseract worked exactly. Space, I was told, was a blanket-like entity, which large objects such as stars and black holes had wrinkled by this force called gravity.
The physics fascinated me, but the implications of our world being so different than what we experienced at face value, was the heart of my interest. I majored in philosophy in college and have always been particularly interested in epistemology, namely the study of how we know things. I believe that at the heart of knowledge and language itself is metaphor, which both encapsulates the latest discoveries we learn from physics and informs how we proceed to live out our lives and structure our realities. Problems arise, however, when we live according to metaphors which are not accurate representations of the world around us. Too often the unintended consequences can have disastrous effects. Multiply such incongruous thinking by a factor of a billion and the cognitive fault lines between perception and reality can produce consequences that can destroy civilizations, even the entire planet.
It is not always easy to let go of an old, even useful, metaphor in order to embrace a new one. Space-as-a-blanket had been hard enough for me to internalize in my imagination, that I balked at a different interpretation. But when that understanding came, the tectonic shift within my mind actually quickened my pulse the moment I understood that reality was made by the interactions between objects and their surroundings. The sun does not wrinkle some originally flat blanket, but actually brings the curvature of space into reality by the interactions of its mass, energy, and chronology. And remember when we learned in school that atoms were like planets with electrons orbiting them like little moons? I thought it such a hoot to learn that we were made up mostly of empty space. But that model also proved to be less than accurate. An atom is now described as having a cloud of electrons since these electrons flit in and out of space-time, depending on whether we are interacting with them or not. In fact, at the smallest scale of the quantum level, bits of matter are constantly blinking in and out of “existence.” Existence, it turns out, is created through interactions between interrelated “objects.” What a strange and delightful universe.
One area that I care deeply about is also an area where our old understanding of the universe keeps leading us down alleys that are ineffectual at best, and terribly destructive at worst. This is the realm of ecology. If there was one discipline that anticipated much of the fundamental principles that physics is uncovering, it would be that of ecology. Ecologists have long stressed the interconnectedness of living things and the interdependence of systems. It is hardly surprising that the most used metaphor to communicate ecological principles is that of a spider’s web, with its multiple strands meeting and expanding out from its nodes of intersections. Many years ago, I was introduced to a philosophy that attempted to incorporate this interconnected reality called General Systems Theory. Certainly not a perfect construction of reality, but here was a philosophy that played with concepts I had fallen in love with. Concepts like feedback loops, synergy, and emerging realities were almost poetic in their attempt to describe the intersectionality of all things. But most of all, the theory dovetailed beautifully with my most favorite concept of gestalt, where the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.
It is painfully clear within our general discourse, that much of our culture clings to worldviews and mindsets long championed during the Enlightenment period. At the core of this philosophy is a mechanistic worldview that claimed we could reduce all things to their parts and reconstruct them however we pleased. Implicit in such a worldview is the neutrality of objects, where the essence of “things” lies in their material components rather than being defined by their interactions and functions. Consequently, the isolated parts become greater than the whole. Think of this as the Lego model of the universe. This Lego Reductionism enabled us to do all kinds of impressive scientific feats. We could build massive structures, shoot rockets at the moon, and cut open an individual to replace their heart. We have accomplished countless technological wonders, all while turning a blind eye to the deadly consequences we exported either to the environment or onto the backs of the poor. Many of us recognize the dangers we are now in as our climate changes, species die out at unsustainable rates, and massive ecological systems are faltering. Unfortunately, we seek to find answers through the same old way of looking at the world, as if simply rearranging the parts will fix the whole.
As a regenerative farmer, I find this reductionistic thinking slapping me in the face any time I join the discussion concerning the things I care about most deeply, such as the environment, health, and the justice issues that intertwine with all things agricultural. And here is where mitigation comes in. When we see the world or an issue simply as an aggregation of parts, our imagination is limited to a rearrangement, or an increase or decrease of individual variables, much like the tweaking of a recipe.
Think of the difference between allopathic medicine, which seeks to treat symptoms by counteracting them with medicines and surgical procedures, and the growing movement of functional medicine which envisions the body as as a gestalt of systems. The former achieves its end goal by means of chemically or physically tweaking variables until the patient’s symptoms are within those elusive parameters of normal. The second attempts to find the roots of dysfunction of the body’s systems, and any treatment that follows seeks to nurse these systems back to health so that the body can heal itself.
When dealing with environmental issues, much like the doctor concerned only with symptoms, rarely do we see solutions that go beyond advocating for less waste, recycling, and limiting our consumption. Mitigation is simply a lessening of something negative. No doubt limiting our footprint is important to slow the damage down, but such “solutions” are utterly bankrupt of imagination, and reveal, if not proceed to spawn, a devastating and subtle nihilism. The nihilism emerges from the fact that we cannot see ourselves as more than a cog in a machine, as if our existence is neutral at best. In a reductionist paradigm, mitigation is the best we can achieve, and complete mitigation is an ideal never attained. Environmentalism, under this nihilistic paradigm, amounts to seeing our existence as destructive, and therefore the best effort we can muster is to minimize that destruction.
In the majority of environmental circles, the most destructive Lego in agriculture is meat. Since I raise and sell animals to eat for a living, I am an enigma to many. Among these vegan-leaning environmentalists are Nature lovers who understand some of the intricacies of trophic cascades and how animals play vital roles in the health of ecosystems. They can tell you how the reintroduction of wolves in Yellowstone revitalized the riparian ecosystems, or how the diet of the otters in the oceans are key to the health of the kelp. In each case, the predators, by the act of eating meat, are maintaining vital interactions between a whole host of life forms. Eating is Nature’s currency. Yet somehow we have gotten it into our heads that we are separate from Nature and that her spiderweb of interrelations and trophic cascades happens apart from our isolated species.
Many of us have heeded the warnings that we are consuming our natural “inheritance” far quicker than it could ever be replenished, be it fossil fuels, fresh water, or the soil we grow our food in. Yet calls to do right by the environment amount to impotent admonishments to consume less so we can last a bit longer, perhaps holding out for some technological miracle that will make our consumption less destructive. Maybe then, we surmise, without us, Nature will have a chance to recuperate, as if we are incapable of participating in systems that help heal. Perhaps when our species’ population did not number in the billions, we could have indulged in the illusion that we are simply an isolatable Lego piece that could be removed from the equation, but now there is no avoiding the fact that we affect the Earth’s ecosystems in profound ways each and every day, for better or worse. We were never truly apart from Nature, and there is no such concept as neutrality when you are an integral part of a system. In fact, we are a keystone species, and if we don’t play our part appropriately, the whole system suffers.
Soil:
If you happened to read my last post, you will already know that my greatest concern is how we have reduced soil to a few mechanistic components. When soil is seen as simply a vessel to hold plants, or a resource to mine, it gets treated as such. Even the soil scientists who care about the soil tend to see it as an aggregate of parts. We have such unchecked faith in our science that we believe we know what ingredients need to be available for soil to be healthy. This is why standard practice to grow things is to start off with a soil test. Such a test will tell you what ingredients are available and what will need to be supplemented. The primary nutrients needed are nitrogen (N), phosphorous (P), and potassium (K). For the sake of simplicity, we will ignore the many micro-nutrients, which are treated in the same manner. Chief among the three primary elements is nitrogen, the building block for the plant’s structure. A soil test will tell you how much nitrogen is available for the plant to passively absorb. But I am telling you, as clear as I can, that this number is essentially irrelevant! Only the soils that we have managed to destroy and reduce to simply lifeless dirt need to have these ingredients added, since the systems that naturally make these essential nutrients available have been annihilated. In a healthy ecosystem, the addition of nitrogen is not needed, because less than 5% of the plant’s nitrogen intake is passive. The rest is harvested from the air through a very complex interchange between plant, roots, mycorrizhal fungi, and a host of microorganisms. Don’t forget that of the gasses in our atmosphere, over three quarters is nitrogen. If the systems of the soil are intact, there is never a deficiency of this ubiquitous element.
Today’s field experts will tell you that certain legumes will fix nitrogen and thus extension agents will encourage the planting of clovers and such. All well and good, but what is unique about these clovers is the over-celebrated information that they are capable of fixing nitrogen in sterilized soil in a lab when coated with a certain inoculate made from bacteria we have “discovered.” We know this, because to maintain strict scientific principles, when experiments are done in the lab, we kill everything in the soil to isolate variables. Sterilization is utter folly when researching the interrelated systems of ecology and tells us little about pastures outside the lab. No plant grows in isolation. The truth is, when in symbiosis with all the critters and microbes and fungi and bacteria in their environment, all plants fix nitrogen. (1)
Phosphorus has a similar tale. Very little phosphorous is free for the taking, and soil tests will come back with dire news that this element, too, needs to be supplemented. As a highly reactive element, phosphorus binds with other elements into forms unavailable to the plant. In most soils, this unavailable form is abundant. Enter in the microbes and bacteria and their alchemistic enzymes. The enzymes do their magic and break the bonds asunder to release phosphorus. This temporarily freed reactive phosphorus is then transported to the plants by the mycorrhizal fungi who exchange this essential nutrient — along with many other nutrients — for carbon in the form of sugars, which the plant has made through photosynthesis.
Potassium is not as well understood, but it is clear that this element is also transported through the microbial bridges and the highways of mycorrhizal fungi networks. In other words, there is a whole web of unfathomably complex infrastructures that coexist to get the nutrients to the plants.
Seems silly to add fertilizers, doesn’t it? But it is not silly. Remember that bit about neutrality not being an option? Fertilizers are extraordinarily destructive. Granted, like surgery or any medical treatment, there are times to intervene in the most cautious and thoughtful ways in order to support a struggling system. But typically, it was the fertilizers that caused the disruption in the first place. What happens when we add N-P-K fertilizer to the farmer’s crops? The grower points to her green, abundant plants and is wholly converted. But this short term technological miracle has devastating consequences for the long run. The nutrients in a N-P-K fertilizer are in an absorbable form, easily accessed by the plant to uptake passively. The plant, like any thrifty consumer, opts for the free nutrients that do not require the exchange of its sugars. The thing that happens to the Mom & Pop country store when a massive Walmart moves in next door also happens to the mycorrhizal fungi, as well as to the symbiotic relationships between microbes and bacteria and everything else supporting that micro economy within the soil. They starve. As the infrastructure of the soil ecosystem falters, the scientific feats of the Green Revolution become facilitators of addiction and dependency — not interdependency, but the impoverishing and disempowering dependency on inputs that were once available in abundance through the symbiotic systems that had evolved over billions of years. All systems tend to develop momentum through positive feedback loops, and destructive systems are no exception. As the plants become dependent on a source that has been reduced to whatever ingredients the farmer now deems necessary, they become sick and susceptible to disease and parasites. And what follows is a whole cycle of spraying poisons that furthers the destruction of whatever vestiges of the ecosystem had managed to hang on until then. When it comes to crop farming, our conventional agriculture amounts to nothing less than a genocide of the gazillions of life forms that make up the ecosystems of our soils.
Water:
However, reductionism isn’t relegated to the discipline of soil science. Enlightenment thinking and extractive language is pervasive in much of our cultural environmental discourse, no more so than in our supposed conservation of water. How many times have you heard something to the effect that it takes 1000 to 2000 gallons to produce a pound of beef, while only 50 to 250 gallons are needed for a pound of beans? (If this information was to be presented as a Zen koan, the answer could only be ‘Mooo.’) Like many statistics, the quantities of 1000 and 50 tell you absolutely nothing. Only within a mechanistic, reductionist mindset would quantity tell you if one system is bad and the other less bad.
This is a perfect moment for a tectonic shift. Typically, the defender of beef will show the dishonesty in the study that included all the transport and production costs that went into feeding a feedlot cow, while the bean’s footprint was limited to simply the water irrigated to grow the plants. I actually think this analysis of the study is correct, but it misses the whole point. If less water is the better choice, it is proof that the writer sees agriculture through the lens of extraction where food production is reduced to mining and extracting a resource out of the dirt. Our only recourse to effect change for the better within such a paradigm is mitigation or limiting damage, because the aim is always to shrink one’s footprint to approach the unattainable goal of “no-effect.” This is essentially the tyranny of a zero-sum game.
An entirely different game is at play if we see these stats through the lens of systems. Let us suppose the beans were raised in a monocrop system where the soil has been tilled, chemicals have been sprayed, and a host of oil-fueled machinery did the work of tilling, planting, fertilizing, weeding, irrigating, spraying of poisons, and harvesting. What if we contrasted that to a cow that was all grass fed, in an intensively managed system, where the pasture was allowed to regrow and thrive without any tilling, planting, spraying, weeding, or irrigating, and no poisons were used at all? Even more important is the fact that in this system, the cow is taking valuable fresh water destined to return to the salty seas and instead ameliorates it within her. Through the processes of her body, the water accumulates nitrogen and a whole host of minerals and nutrients that the plants and critters within the soil can thrive on once it is peed out. This is Nature’s original irrigation system, which is of course so much more complex than simply transporting gallons of water to a product to grow. This water from the cow’s urine is now not only available to help sustain an entire pasture ecosystem, but also adds to the reserve from which the plants can tap into as they cool the air around them. In the first system we have 50 gallons of water that is being treated as a mined resource, to use up like a fuel, in order to produce a pound of protein. From this perspective, we will always be happier for a lower number, since that means we will run out later than sooner. When water is but a Lego, its usage never amounts to more than cannibalizing the reserve of our ecological inheritance. Contrast that to the second scenario, where water is an essential input of a system which regenerates and sustains an ecosystem, helps build soil, sequesters carbon, and cools the Earth as it does all these things. Suddenly it becomes a disappointing fact that the study was misleading and 1000 gallons are not being used to ameliorate the soil and the ecosystems of the pasture. In the end, though, the quantity is of lesser importance. What is of essence is whether the water is participating in a system that regenerates the environment or one that degenerates its ecosystem. Nothing in Nature is neutral.
Methane:
I don’t suppose I could write about cows without addressing the issue of methane. There is hardly any greater farce than the red herring of that ever-so-dangerous gas that is burped out from the ruminants. This is reductionism in its most inane and pernicious form. Methane, it has been explained to me on countless occasions, while not lasting as long in the atmosphere as CO2, can be 100 times more effective at warming our globe. Cows emit an enormous amount of methane and therefore should be eliminated. QED.
Again the defending argument tends to be one of quantity, citing that there used to be more buffalo roaming our lands than there are now cows being raised. That may be true — even an indication that massive herds have the potential to be extraordinarily beneficial to the environment — but again the heart of the matter has been overlooked. Climate change is about a system out of whack and not about the quantity of ingredients that go into our atmosphere. Our attempts to limit methane or CO2 by means of agreements and taxes and regulations are much like the allopathic doctor counteracting symptoms with chemicals to achieve some sort of equilibrium. Such strategies may buy us some time, but the root of the imbalance, however, is never addressed. Methane and CO2 have always cycled through the atmosphere, water, and land of this globe. This cycle is part of what makes our planet habitable. For the sake of time, I will put aside the fact that the most important substance that regulates temperature on Earth is water. For my present purposes, I want to focus on methane and how it is made.
One misunderstanding worth pointing out is that cows don’t actually eat grass. Nothing can really eat such cellulose-rich plants except very small bacteria and protozoa. The ruminant has four chambers in her “stomach” which essentially ferment the grass by means of these bacteria and protozoa. The cow then derives nutrients from her food by consuming these microorganisms. In a very real sense, ruminants are not herbivores. They ingest plants to feed the critters within them and then consume these tiny little microorganisms. They simply could not get enough protein by eating the grasses directly. What this has to do with methane is that anytime and anywhere bacteria breakdown organic material in an anaerobic environment this gas is produced as a byproduct. This is as true in the cow’s rumen as it is in swamps and wetlands.
In fact, so much methane is naturally produced in wetlands that you can tap into the trees growing in the marsh and light the escaping gas on fire. The methane produced in these wetlands far outproduces the amount emitted from cows, yet I have never heard an environmentalist argue for anything but the preservation of these unique ecosystems. Did you know that termites emit an enormous amount of methane? In fact, recent research has estimated that the trees of the Amazon rain forest emit somewhere around 40 million tons of methane a year. (2) No one in their right mind would advocate for the elimination of this essential ecosystem on the basis of its methane emission. Ruminants are also essential to ecosystems and should be treated with no less respect.
This is not to say that cows or sheep belong everywhere or in every ecosystem, just like we don’t need a world covered only in trees. But if your goal is to convince me that the ruminant is undesirable, don’t spew out irrelevant statistics about the gas in their burps or how much water they drink. Rather, explain to me how their impact negatively affects the systems around them. Maybe a particular ecosystem has evolved with a different niche animal, and the cow will disrupt what is already healthy and vibrant. But these are not the reasoning of the vegetarian or vegan. They begin with an evil Lego and will construct whatever argument to prove their point, regardless of if they are advocating to eradicate a keystone species that is essential to maintaining the health of an ecosystem.
I have been harping on isolatable variables and quantities, but obviously ingredients are part of the whole. Quantities and focusing on individual Legos can help with diagnosis and assessments of systems, as long as they remain subservient to the more important metric of how the ingredients are interrelating. If something needs to be changed, we don’t simply add or eliminate an ingredient to get a recommended quantity — that is allopathic environmentalism. We must try and understand the system as a whole. When we manage to diagnose the problem, the solution is always to support a part of the system that is struggling, not eliminate some integral part of the whole system. In essence, the importance of a system goes far beyond the actual ingredients, and a solution to a failing system focuses on the interrelationships. Coupled with the rejection of the Lego model of the universe comes the acknowledgement that we, too, are an integral part of these systems. It is clear from ecology that the primary mode for any species to interact with the natural systems around us is through eating. And if eating is Nature’s currency, we need a much deeper understanding of our food choices and how they reverberate through the soil at our feet, the air we breathe, and the water that sustains us.
I began this essay by pointing out how physics is showing over and over that the essential and pervasive foundation of our universe is interaction. It is, in fact, what creates reality. If we could just internalize this fact the tiniest bit, a whole world of possibilities might open up. And rather than resign ourselves to mitigating the damage we cause, we would begin to strategize about which systems we want to be a part of, which systems we would like to support, and what kind of healthy, emerging, new systems we could imagine that would synergistically integrate all the intricate interrelations of ourselves and the world around us.
In Frank Herbert’s 1965 masterpiece Dune, Liet-Kynes, the planetary ecologist, is left out in the desert to die. His thoughts come staccato, in the voice of his father, as he fights delirium in his last minutes:
The real wealth of a planet is in its landscape, how we take part in that basic source of civilization — agriculture…
The highest function of ecology is understanding consequence…
The more life there is within a system, the more niches there are for life…
Life makes needed nutrients more readily available. It binds more energy into the system through the tremendous chemical interplay from organism to organism…
To the working planetologist, his most important tool is human beings. You must cultivate ecological literacy among the people…
We must use man as a constructive ecological force … to transform the water cycle, to build a new kind of landscape…
The historical system of mutual pillage and extortion stops here on Arrakis. You cannot go on forever stealing what you need without regard to those who come after…
A planet’s life is a vast, tightly interwoven fabric…
