Fertility, in tooth and claw
What is the opposite of nature red in tooth and claw? Where does all that competitive hype come from really? Can we own our view of nature and of our place in it?
I picked up a reprint of an old book. Makes me sound fusty but the important issues of our time were sorted many moons ago, we just don’t pay attention. In 1955, the year of my birth, Newman Turner published Fertility Pastures: Herbal leys as the basis of soil fertility and animal health. Maybe it is that gap in time that allows us to see how comprehensively our culture has collapsed.[1]
I love his notion of fertility. If the soil is fertile, by definition the plants that grow in it are healthy and diverse. A circular relationship of course: the plants feed the healthy soil and the soil biology sorts out the nutrients for the plants. There is no other way. Where Turner goes is that the animals that graze on the plants growing on healthy soils are themselves fertile. Their reproduction is healthy. They thrive. And then the people who eat those animals and the plants growing in the fertile soil and themselves fertile.
In a recurrent theme in these blogs, we want to recognise that the fungi, the bacteria, the arthropods, the nematodes, the whole panoply of soil biology make available to a great diversity of plants exactly the nutrients that those cows need and that we need ourselves. We cannot do better. We cannot make supplements that mimic this. We cannot even understand and enumerate what it is that this system does. And Turner in 1955 says all you need to do is to look at the fertility of what you can observe.[2]
Our mindset is to do expensive and incredibly fallible research. Fertility falls in the population and we search out reasons why it falls in the mechanisms of the human body and its deficiencies and excesses. We are so far from understanding that we need to have better stewardship of the only source of that fertility. And of course, many farming practices take the animals away from their contact with the only source of their fertility, so that what we eat has also lost all connection. The problem with feedlot beef and pig factories is seen as animal welfare, and the welfare is indeed terrible and unmendable, but the issue for our own fertility is simple, as Turner says: we broke the chain.
The issue with people who think of nature as red in tooth and claw is that they are focussing on survival when survival may involve a fight. But the context of that statement is the great web of intimate connections that enable those animals and plants to be there in the first instance. First a world that works, then, at the margins, some competition for resources. We tell that inverted story to justify our own rapacious natures. It is telling that we do not study or put into story the utterly fantastic web of interdependence that we compromise at our peril.
Turner’s message is so seductively simple. See what thrives and adjust our stewardship in mimicry of natural systems to recover that vigour. The same approach applies to organizations, looking for what works, naturally, and encouraging more of that rich learning. Just think of the billions spent in vain and exploitative research to start to bring us back to the simple wisdom. What is wrong with us?
Once more around this block. There are people whose mental categories are based on a Judaeo-Christian notion of sin. They avoid things. They may avoid pesticides and artificial fertilisers. They typically believe in germ theory and keeping everything clean and sterile. They refuse certain foods. They avoid certain behaviours as being morally wrong. They think of themselves as outside nature. Their worldview is that they can survive and stay healthy by avoiding things, avoiding risks of many types. They look for rules and guidance. This is red-in-tooth-and-claw thinking and it takes you away from the wisdom that you need.
Fertility as a key
In an ecosystem if something is fertile it tends to increase. Soil builds. Herds of animals increase. Now increase is not necessarily a positive thing: there are limits that will be found. But from the point of view of the ecosystem balance and robustness is achieved by the fertility of all filling the available niches and offering support to all the crucial interconnections. If something increases to a damaging extent it will be a temporary excursion of the system to put right an imbalance that has disturbed the system. Think algal blooms on lakes that occur because there are too many nutrients in the water.
The nature of “competition” is that life forms contribute to the fertility and increase of other life forms. They do this because evolution has arrived at systems that stabilise themselves and their environments. Life leads to life.[3]
On an evolutionary timescale, the abuse of these systems by humans and their agriculture hardly registers. For ten thousand years people have grown monocultures of grains. The practice destroys the soil and leads to deserts and the collapse of civilisations. But it also leads to a catastrophic decline in human fertility. The argument here is that it can do no other. There cannot possibly be an impoverishment of a part of an ecosystem that is not reflected in a decline of health and fertility of all species, including humans.
We can view climate change through this lens. Does climate change reduce fertility in many species including humans? What we are observing is the limits of life’s ability to control the climate as its environment. Ultimately, we do not need to understand the mechanisms: we simply need to say that if life is no longer controlling microclimates (temperature, rainfall, sunshine, wind) then we have disturbed our own life support in a way that reduces our own fertility and life chances. No other description is necessary.
Our question in this post is the nature of the difference between Turner’s logical and accurate focus on the essentials of a situation and the abject failure of our own academic, industrial and popular thinking in the 65 years since: two generations of people faced with the decline of humanity.
Productivity
Is the production of twice as much wheat from a piece of land a good thing or a bad thing? It has been assumed throughout human history that it is a good thing.[4] Indeed the “science” of economics is founded on it being a goal. In reality it is a sales proposition: if you would like to grow twice as much wheat, I will show you how. The benefits will be mine and the ultimate costs will be yours. It is a Faustian proposition.
We can do a quick patching in of the context that was missing. Is wheat a food that humans ought to be consuming: how does it affect our fertility? How does growing it affect the fertility of the soil and of the other parts of the local ecosystem? You probably know that Kellogg conceived of his cornflakes as a way to reduce masturbation in boys… and I understand that it works. And if wheat production becomes a dominant form of agriculture, what are the risks of collapse?
Our thinking question around Turner is one about foreground and background. Are we trying to produce food that leads to human flourishing and fertility or are we trying to maximise short term gain in some way, no matter what the costs and who the costs fall to?
Lack of information lives here. Turner is concerned about hay and silage. Is a ton of hay the same as another ton of hay? Even if you qualify that as good sweet hay and less good hay, do you have the information you need? Well no, not even close. Some hay will support fertility in the animals that eat it and some will not. And if we look at cow cake designed to optimise milk yield, what is the fate of the cows? What Faustian bargain are we into now? Many things that we assume are commodities are not.[5]
The reasons that they are not are process reasons: the way something was produced and especially the actual fertility of the soil it comes from determines, amongst many other things, the balance between essential micronutrients and the relative absence of harmful substances. At a level that would be costly to analyse and totally impractical as a routine practice.
At this level we can see animal welfare as a proxy for practices connected to fertility. It is not a matter of legalistic regulations for what welfare standards might mean, but whether the wellbeing of the animals even registers on the scale of concerns alongside cost and productivity.
As ever, we can be surprised. When we optimise for soil fertility, we can often get an improved profitability of an agricultural enterprise. The attempt to optimise productivity closer to the end “product” fails in its own terms, when compared to a strategy that is closer to natural processes. Don’t expect commercial forces to provide that information!
Failing reasoning
To get an experiment to meet standards of scientific reasoning, you have to be really clear what it is that is being investigated. And that clarity tends to mean simplification and the exclusion of confounding factors. The agricultural science that has been misleading for half a century and more misses the boat right at the start. It wants to show the factors that lead to improved productivity against various measures: this is the sales pitch.
The work being done on regenerative agriculture is being done largely by cooperative ventures linking local farmers and by maverick scientists with a very different take on the world. Didi Pershouse (who I did an online course with) practiced community agriculture before becoming a world expert on the soil sponge. I think this shows that the faulty reasoning is fully institutionalised and better reasoning can only take place away from academia and government institutions. This is potentially a really powerful lesson that all the people who need to learn it will be completely blind to.
We also need to touch on what would happen if you ran a Warm Data Lab on this, in the style of Nora Bateson. Starting with human fertility, we might note that we no longer know what the correct balance of micronutrients is for human thriving and we no longer have access to a fully healthy gut microbiome to study. We are drowning in misinformation about the macronutrient balance of healthy diet and we simply don’t know how many epigenetic switches have been set during in utero development.
If we don’t know what soil health looks like and we don’t know what plant health looks like and we don’t know what animal health looks like or human health we are going to have to look for complex interconnections to guide us back. We know as described above that the relevant “sciences” are systematically misleading for systematic reasons and to see how differently we need to see things becomes a messy and complex enterprise.
False promises
It would be so comforting if someone could just tell us which way is up. There are Turners around now, but they are drowned out by people with louder voices and more money to spend on convincing you otherwise. We have constructed a world in which we have to fight for even a hint of truth.
So, hang on to fertility. There is no substitute. And you cannot have your fertility without the fertility of the cows you eat and the fertility of the soil that evolved with the pasture plants they ate. Everything else is a lie no matter how well intentioned or sexy. Do we find fertility sexy? Remember red and tooth and claw is also a lie to separate us from our life support systems.
[1] . Speaking of which, my colleague Terry Cripps says that the UK does not have a culture: we are completely philistine about the possibility of progress in opening our minds via the arts. We want entertaining and that is all. Gulp.
[2] Regular readers will notice that this parallels our Gently Serious consulting notions of a healthy organization, fertile in its learning and rich diversity. It may not be possible to enumerate the reasons why, but the ongoing results are clearly observable.
[3] “Variety destroys variety”, too, but in the sense of coping with it by matching fertility with fertility, rather than in any real sense of destruction.
[4] If we substitute ‘cork’ for ‘wheat’ in the question, then there are other views. A colleague once suggested to a Portuguese cork-farming family that they could increase the yield by planting another tree in a particular spot, a notion that was promptly rejected on the grounds that a cork tree would’ve grown there already, had one been needed.
[5] Of course, part of the reason that we view things as commodities is the legibility required of us by management and taxation practices.
