Toward a Sustainable Planet
In The Coming Collapse we looked at how our pollution is quickly changing our planet toward uninhabitable, how current pollution reduction solutions are insufficient, and how it has become increasingly clear that we will need to shift to a path that is markedly different than the one we are on- a path that combines regenerative agriculture with economy re-localization.
Since our global economy is constantly looking for new ways to create more and more wealth, it has us accelerating down a path of increased pollution.
After being told that it was safe decades ago, sludge from our waste water facilities has been used to fertilize farm land. It turns out that the sludge still contains the chemicals that go down city sewer drains, including forever chemicals(PFAs). We now have over 70 million acres, or 18% of US farmland that is contaminated. These chemicals are now in our food, water, and air.
Since our agriculture sector is a major cause of chemical pollution, the first thing that we should do is to switch to regenerative agriculture. RA eliminates the need to produce, transport, and apply energy intensive chemical fertilizers because it uses animals and plants to fertilize soil. RA also eliminates the need for other energy intensive chemicals like pesticides. A few of the many other benefits include providing more nutritious clean food, cleaning our water and air, increasing farmer profits, creating jobs, and sequestering carbon. It does all this by mimicking nature.
To give a quick snapshot of what the ideal RA looks like- we plant a cover crop seed mix in the fall or early spring that is selected according to our animal/soil needs and regional climate. By late spring we have a nutrient rich thick cover. Large herbivores are rotated through the paddocks first with the help of easily moveable solar electric fences. They are moved to the next paddock as soon as they have eaten their choice plants. Right behind them we have smaller herbivores like sheep, goats, and pigs who also eat their favorite plants before being moved. Then come birds like chickens, geese, ducks, and guinea fowl which add even more vital nutrients to the soil. After a given number of years the soil is fertilized enough to grow plants for human food, textiles, and building materials. This process can also be used to fertilize vineyards, orchards, and agroforestry. Regenerative agriculture pioneer and leader Gabe Brown gives an excellent overview in his recent 15 minute TEDx talk:
“Renowned soil scientist Dr. Rattan Lal of Ohio State University calculates that improved soil management can sequester 178 billion tons of atmospheric carbon by 2100 and that when combined with increases in biomass(trees), can drop atmospheric CO2 concentrations by 157 parts per million (ppm). If our current loading of CO2 into the atmosphere could be halted, the reduction via soil and biomass improvements could get us to 263 ppm. That’s a pre-industrial level sufficient to actually reverse the warming trend — not just slow it down.”
It is estimated that every year between 200,000 and 500,000 tonnes of microplastics from synthetic fibers are ending up just in our oceans. Regenerative textile innovators have provided the solution to our synthetic fiber pollution with regenerative flax, hemp, wool, cotton, and dye.
Although natural fibers can be used for other things like insulation, hemp building products have really taken off. What started with hempcrete is now numerous products including hemp blocks and hemp wood. Non-toxic hemp building products are also mold, fire, and insect resistant. Another thing about natural fibers is that they can be grown and processed locally.
The second part of the equation is economy re-localization. Although some have proposed that we build interstates over the top of existing interstates to accommodate more and more automobiles, what we must do is the exact opposite- to greatly reduce our use of automobiles. Just the use of automobile tires creates an estimated six million metric tons of particulate pollution yearly. We need to transform to a society that is, for the most part, walkable. This means that any community larger than a small town should be prevented from growing outward. We can use economic incentives to motivate people to move to rural areas to power regenerative agriculture.
If somehow we choose to pursue this path of less, it will require major cuts to the heavily polluting transportation, industrial, and commercial sectors. The burning of fossil fuels involved in the manufacture and use of motor vehicles is definitively the greatest cause of pollution that we need to cut.
It will also require major cuts to world trade. Transporting trillions of dollars in goods across the planet every year will simply never be sustainable.
Certainly many readers are now having uncertainties about the idea of less. Sustainability researcher and author Gaya Herrington points out in her recent TED talk that by making these changes we can create a thriving society that still enjoys amenities like electricity, heating and cooling, and plumbing. If we do not, our acceleration toward societal collapse will continue, leading to a world where billions of people lose everything.
We simply must switch back to economies in which most of what we need is produced locally. The following 8 minute video created by Local Futures shows the obscene waste and destructiveness of the global system. Just one example is that since 2021, the US has been exporting over 3 billion pounds of beef yearly while also importing over 3 billion pounds of beef yearly. Their Closer to Home video goes more in depth into how the global economy has become the driver of unhappiness, inequality, poor health, threats to democracy, crime, unemployment, and in many cases higher food prices.
So, what would a localized economy look like? We can look first at small towns. Most everything can be within a mile away- school, library, post office, police and FD, grocery and hardware stores, health care facilities, and many types of shops. Those who lose global economy jobs would easily find jobs in the local food, textile, and building product sectors. We can do the same thing in cities, dividing them into walkable sections. Our commutes would then be so short that our current vehicles would last many decades.
A bulk of the jobs in the new economy would be food related. This would be enjoyable work. The picture below is a planting and harvesting schedule that shows how work can be spread out through most of the year. At a given age, school children could help in the easy work at surrounding farms to gain the knowledge and grit that some adults have. In cities especially, buses would transport people to farms, much like with detasseling but with easier work.
It seems only fitting that we also bring back local glass canning on a large scale since it has both environmental and health benefits. This would also reduce the amount of energy that is needed for our food refrigeration.
Increases in clean energy production has not reduced our pollution as much as we need for three reasons: the global economy is constantly demanding more energy, non-local energy production has huge transmission inefficiencies, and it takes a lot of energy to mine and manufacture clean energy systems. There is also environmental problems with disposal of old equipment. The best that we can do while clean energy inevitably becomes cleaner is to ensure that it is local and locally owned. This combined with reductions in overall power use could put us on a sustainable path.
Speaking of energy, but also to more obscene waste and destructiveness of our current economy, over 200 science faculty at colleges and universities in Iowa pointed out that a “one-acre solar farm produces as much energy as 100 acres of corn-based ethanol.” Just the pollution from distilling it is so bad that there is now a major effort underway to capture the exhaust from the distillation plants, pipe it hundreds of miles in dangerous high pressure pipelines, and pump it into the ground. This all paid for by our tax dollars.
Since a lot of Americans would still like to travel, the US should certainly join the transportation leaders of the world and boost low pollution rail travel.
The picture below shows Amtrak’s existing routes(grey) along with their proposed new routes(color). It is currently slower than high-speed rail and plane travel, but it makes up for speed in its quality.
This transformation would require major investments and policy change at first, but we would all live in abundance once a sustainable society is built. The good thing is that we can do what we did during WW2 by asking the top 10% to give back some of their enormous wealth. As of January 2025, the world’s billionaires alone had a combined net worth of $14.2 trillion. And if we can convince all the countries of the world to unite against our common enemy, we would be able to reallocate the over $2.4 trillion yearly global military spending along with all of the military personnel.
Since most Americans surely now believe that the federal and state governments have failed them, it seems to be a good time to consider localizing our government to at least a county level. Not that we should completely do away with federal and state government, we might consider eliminating the Senators and Representatives by giving citizens the power to vote directly via the internet on the legislation that affects them.
Surely, most Americans are now feeling that the health insurance industry has also failed them. We simply must move to a not-for-profit system.
Though we will have to start mostly with city and town based societies fed by farms that use tractors, our ultimate goal should be to get most people living in small mostly self-sustaining close-to-nature ecovillages that rely on permaculture for their food and materials. Permaculture is the most natural type of regenerative agriculture and does not use tractors. The following 30 minute video is about one of many such small communities. Does it look like the people are happy? Does it look like they have any desire to return to city life? This is what we can create everywhere. Thank you for reading!
