Four-legged Facts in Context
Facts and fake news, a lack of context, insufficient variety. Maybe we need a neologism: cybernethics, perhaps? The it’s-not-me-it’s-the-facts sort of thing. Let us begin this tale of facts and context at the beginning, in a four-legs-good kind of way.
By Aidan Ward and Philip Hellyer
Mobile Anaerobic Digesters
Walter Jehne tells a good yarn about mobile anaerobic digesters, a.k.a. cows. There are lots of veggie snowflake numpties[1] going around at the moment saying that cows are causing global warming because they emit methane. Of course, a moment’s glance at the data indicates this is unlikely: the population of cows is largely static and the concentration of methane is going up sharply. And for those with a nose for these things, the fact that fracking emits an unknown but vast amount of methane makes it likely that the source of the cow libel comes from there.[2]
But to Walter’s yarn, couched nicely in terms of scientific facts. Do cows emit methane at both ends? Yes indeed, a significant amount. As do mechanical digesters and ourselves. Is methane a greenhouse gas? Yes, very much so. Game on. He calls that context one. In the next larger context, we look at cows grazing pasture, as they have done since time immemorial, and the concentration of methane in the atmosphere was absolutely stable for millions of years. Look at the chemistry of that stability: the pasture transpires moisture from a soil whose ability to hold water depends on the cows; the water vapour is ionised by the sun’s rays and oxidises any excess methane present. There are approximately one thousand times as many ions produced as needed to mop up the methane. Do pasture-grazing cows produce global warming through their emissions? No, they buffer the atmosphere against such an outcome. This is the cow in its natural environment, not the agribusiness version. Thousands of cows in a shed eating maize are indeed a problem, as such an abomination should be expected to be.[3]
There is a context three. There are large concentrations of trapped methane in two terrestrial environments. One sort is frozen beneath the ocean on the continental shelf and the other is trapped inside the frozen tundra. As the earth warms either of these sources can produce a sudden eruption of methane, enough to dwarf any other factor. This has happened in the past and produced widespread extinction of life. Would humankind survive such an event? Probably not. Our chances are largely controlled by the buffering effect in context two. If there is enough moist, transpiring pasture, not built environment and not desert, we stand the best chance. So are cows a problem? They may be our only chance of survival!
Remember Heinz von Foerster:
“Objectivity is a subject’s delusion that observing can be done without him. Invoking objectivity is abrogating responsibility — hence its popularity.”
It is a fact that cows emit significant quantities of the greenhouse gas, methane. It is a fact that we depend on cows to keep pasture green to limit the amount of methane in the atmosphere. It is a fact that if we were planning to prevent human extinction we would greatly increase the number of cows. Choose your stance.
A colleague of mine says that our mutual friend Angus is the only person he knows that can use (Rosenberg’s) Non-Violent Communication to clobber someone over the head. The strange missionary zeal of vegans in wanting to change what YOU eat to save the world has the same perversity. Yes, Angus is a spiritual veggie. I think the spirit of this is both puritanical/missionary and colonial in its roots. Let’s look at that.
Grass-fed beef is a fantastic basis for human health. In fact, if you are going to eat one food for 100% of your diet it is probably the best choice. Store-fed beef? Not so good. This for me is a classic instance of joined-up truth. Since humans are part of the ecosystem, whether we deny it or not, the fact the we thrive on grass-fed beef indicates that grazing cows are unlikely to be an ecosystemic problem.
Mutual thriving might be about as good an indicator of an healthy ecosystem balance as we’ve got. Congruence is another candidate, one that more clearly also applies to organisations.
Colonial approaches to farming
Another person who can tell a good yarn is Jonathan Lundgren. The colonisers in this yarn are Monsanto and the other big agrochemical firms. In good colonial style they control the market in their US backyard with an iron fist and lots and lots of dollars to corrupt the science. And they work from there to colonise the rest of the world too. Utterly disgusting and disgraceful.
Reps from agrobusiness companies will sell you seed, fertilisers, herbicide, and pesticide to give you maximum yield on your crops. Of course, everything they sell you is cost-justified, worth the extra input cost for the extra output. Except it doesn’t work, never did, and never will.
Farmers questioned the externalisations in that system. They didn’t like the quality of the food produced. They didn’t like the effects on the ecosystem, such as the decline of bees and insects. They didn’t like the effects on the soil. So the bold, contrary, quirky, non-conformist, awkward types[4] ignored what the reps told them to do.
They showed that you can do it differently, using biodiversity instead of invasive practices, and generate twice the rate of profit. You don’t have to buy those expensive inputs that don’t add up. Looked at from this perspective, the colonial theme is clear: you can work for Monsanto or you can work for yourself.[5] When Lundgren and his researchers went to the fields to see the numbers of pest insects on the crops on neighbouring farms, there were ten times MORE on fields sprayed with insecticide than on fields using biodiversity as a natural control.[6]
You can tell, after the event, that this is a colonial system by the repression. Monsanto with their billions take impoverished farmers to court or defend cases brought against them with ridiculous amounts of money. I contributed to a crowdfunding campaign to try and protect a poor old guy who successfully sued them for wrecking his health with glyphosate.
But worse than bad corporate behaviour is the way the state authorities and the academic establishment fall into line behind the money. Lundgren is crystal clear that the moment you question the way this system works you can no longer get research grants. Period. Forever. He even said there are attempts to hang your family out to dry too. Thoroughly Stalinist: right to free speech? Forget it, no such thing.
To go back to a previous discussion on values, the corporates like Monsanto do drive US wealth. But they do so essentially by extracting rent. Such a tax on the rest of their industry is hardly a recipe for US competitiveness. You can have rent-extracting corporates or you can have innovation and development by smaller firms, but not both.
The farmers doing it differently present a very real problem to the corporates. These farmers make more money by eschewing costly inputs. Those costly inputs are the lifeblood of the Monsantos. They are the colonial tax. There is a general point here: if you want the advice of experts, no matter what field you are in, they will only provide it if the solution allows them to make money.[7] But all the best solutions are both local and free. It used to be the case that academia could bridge this problem to some degree, but they have been comprehensively bought and the loophole is closed.
Social history
The history of all this is important. It is important in that Conway’s Law fashion that we have explored so much already. We can only produce solutions that work the way we are already organised. Our colleague Bob Marshall notes that we can only organise according to our collective mindset, the organisational psyche.[8] The way we are organised and the way that organisation produces the blindnesses and the false solutions to climate change are of huge importance, existential importance as people like to say now. But the history is far from obvious.
I am going to invoke Angus again. Angus is a member of the Anthroposophical Society, the people who try to take the legacy of Rudolf Steiner forwards. And I am reading Eco-Alchemy by Dan McKanan which is a history of the very prominent role the anthropofs have played in the organic movement. But on the very opening page and paragraph I read “human beings have always evolved in symbiosis with wheat and cattle”, a statement I cannot make sense of, let alone agree with. Wheat was first cultivated in Mesopotamia about 12,000 years ago, and as we have discussed was pretty toxic to humans in lots of ways, socially as well as biologically.
The Monsanto “solution” and the “avoiding fossil fuels” solution we understand the structure of. There are giant, stupidly powerful corporations who have long since bought their regulators and various governments. We can go along with them or oppose them David and Goliath. The nascent organisation of people working literally on the grass roots (isn’t that fascinating) are organised a bit like anarchists, as they must if they are not to be subverted.
Steiner in his own estimation founded spiritual science where spiritual truths can be found by spiritual exercises and discoveries. In that mindset, spiritual truth trumps more mundane truths, so you plant seeds according to the phases of the moon because of the spiritual truth behind that proposition. Such practices are widespread in Germany and across continental Europe.
Steiner is a somewhat messianic figure, channelling truths from the spiritual world. Our anarchic rebels who know they are being lied to by agribusiness and government advisers are at some opposite extreme structurally speaking. My interest is that some of the practical conclusions about nature, ecosystems and the importance of connections seem to overlap. As we pointed out in the recent blog about regenerative practices, there cannot be a distinction between the patterns of “farming” and the patterns of the cultural and social systems which farm. If we are to have a regenerative agriculture, of necessity both of these “parts” must mesh.
Remember Robin Wall Kimmerer teaching her class of ecology students and asking them what the positive role for humankind in the world ecosystems might be? They didn’t know, they knew only of the destructive role of humans. This is the metabolic rift we spoke of: we don’t know our own role, we don’t even know how to find out. Our social systems no longer echo the ecosystems that support us: we are blind to them. Conway’s Law says we do not know how to act because we do not know how to relate to each other.
Multi-species pointers
My friend Libby Robinson in Penrith knows that native ponies are part of the regenerative solution. The people at Knepp Castle in Sussex know that Tamworth pigs, Longhorn cattle, Dartmoor ponies, and Fallow deer are part of their regenerative patterns. Similarly there are plants that we have lost, perhaps particularly some of the very deep rooted plants and grasses, that are part of any regeneration solution.
It is a very short step from there to say that these plants and animals can teach us what we need to know. Of course they understand their role and their niche and what to do in it. They haven’t abstracted themselves into logical nonsense the way we have: we are the animal that destroys ecosystems and habitats, even while we spout nonsense about management.[9]
Better still would be to talk about multi-species solutions, where it is our partnership with ponies and pigs that is studied. Where is the creative part of that relationship? We are used to pigs in sties or in pens, or at best in very muddy fields with shelters. But if you watch pigs gambolling in a meadow or splashing in shallow water, there is clearly a joy we can understand and an intelligence that we need to join with. The humility of understanding when animals know better than we do[10] has always been an important tonic for our tendency to hubris.
If you want to experience the feeling of that multi-species thrill in an artistic medium, I recommend an exhibition (in museums and on the net) called Ashes and Snow. Completely lyrical interaction of people with animals, elephants in particular. Dreamlike and portentous. But better still, find the animals that you need to learn from about how the world works for us all.
[1] We’ve rehearsed before how engrained the positions of the establishment are, the number of veggies and vegans in influential positions and how, if the fate of the world depends upon, say, cows, we’re uniquely positioned to miss the opportunity. Restaurant at the End of the Universe, anyone?
[2] When in doubt, find a culprit and a group of people who will happily spread your fake news…
[3] Our colleague Nora Bateson and her father Gregory both warn against taking shortcuts. There are always consequences.
[4] One of my favourite notions, you’ll not be surprised, is the Shavian archetype of the awkward, unreasonable person:
“The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.” –Maxims for Revolutionists, G.B. Shaw
[5] It’s a bit like the old notion of the company store, where a ‘free’ workforce spent their earnings on goods that were priced and supplied by the company that also set their wages and often provided their lodgings.
[6] Mutual thriving, again.
[7] We’ve said before that if my advice means that you need more of my services, that’s not good consulting, not in good faith.
[8] Bob Marshall, Hearts over Diamonds, 2018. To him also credit for bringing us the notion of congruence as a measure of organizational wellbeing.
[9] Shaw again: “The man who listens to Reason is lost: Reason enslaves all whose minds are not strong enough to master her.”
[10] The cat, “looking for the door into summer”, as Robert A. Heinlein put it, is learning something specific about the environment out the front, out the back, etc. To our impoverished senses, both options are the same, outside is outside. But then we don’t have skin in that game…
