Regenerative system action
We build extractive systems. We see a chance to mine, figuratively, a resource for some sort of profit. We grow crops on the soil, we farm fish in the sea, we drill for oil and gas for energy, we build corporations that extract the labour of people. Our metaphor for this activity is often competitive: we think we must do it better, faster, more completely than others to ensure our own survival. Grabbing.
Many of these extractive systems were tolerable and then became intolerable. They could be viewed in sufficient isolation and then it became clear they were part of wider systems. The economics of extractive systems was shown by events and outcomes to be one where costs and risks were externalised for someone else to bear. As that became clear the competitive nature of extractive systems tightened and it would be better to call them exploitative systems. And now the very future of humankind on earth is at stake with everything visibly coupled to everything else.
I was privileged to have a wonderful day with wonderful people in a house near Penrith bringing into view some of the culture and politics of land use in the Lake District as a laboratory for understanding some of these issues. Our guiding framework for the day was another sort of a system, a regenerative system. Regeneration is about bringing into consciousness some of the necessary connections and cultural roots of humans in a landscape, so that the whole physical and social system can start first to recover and then regenerate to be more of what it needs to be.
Part of why we call things extractive and exploitative is a privileging of humankind in our view of the ecosystem that supports us. We are prepared to wreck things if humans need work and sustenance. The antidote to privileging humankind is to understand in depth how we are, and need to be, enmeshed with living systems. My sudden immersion in this started with being introduced to some Lakeland fell ponies in a valley near Tebay. These ponies are native and can live on the fells all year round. They are fiercely intelligent creatures who in the recent past had a strong bond with local working people. Here is a strong example of necessary multi-species solutions: we need the intelligence of these animals. But we are quite prepared to let them go extinct.
The metabolic rift
“Why do [powerful people] believe so strongly in an ecocidal system? The explanation that works best for me is the existence of a metabolic rift between man and the earth. This is the idea that a combination of paved surfaces and pervasive media have rendered us cognitively blind to the health of the living systems of which we are a part.” John Thackara
We bridge or overcome the metabolic rift only by actually working across it. Recently it becomes clearer that one of the key bridges is the soil. The soil on the fells in the Lake District is almost non-existent in many places. So there is little support for plants and trees that will support the rest of the ecosystem of animals and birds and insects. We see an impoverished environment, maybe irreparably damaged by extractive agriculture, and because of the metabolic rift we do not even know that it is a desert. That is the challenge.
Just to be clear, much of the “management” by Natural England and the National Trust of these iconic landscapes is maintaining the desert. These bodies do not understand the nature of the damage or of the regeneration that might address it. And one of the signals of this lack of understanding is their lack of appreciation of the role of fell ponies in maintaining the landscape, either as grazers, or as working animals.
And just to illustrate the nitty-gritty of this, a local hill farmer who is the latest of several generations of family with grazing rights on some fell land for his ponies, was taken to court by Natural England. The ponies were supposed to have damaged a Site of Special Scientific Interest: interesting accusations when the ponies have been grazing the site for at least 150 years and have presumably been maintaining it by doing so. The truth was closer to the local large landowner wanting the ponies off the hill the better to shoot the grouse. This farmer is in his eighties and does not know how to write. But he knows more about the relationship between humans, ponies and the land than the scientists employed by Natural England in the case will ever know. That is also our challenge: science on the wrong side of the argument. And maintaining the craft knowledge base that will allow us to bridge the metabolic rift before it is lost forever. Ecocidal indeed.
I need to say at this point that I am not a horse person, nor even an animal person at all. Part of my own metabolic rift. But these ponies were evocative in a way I am still coming to grips with. They ran across the rough hillside to greet, boisterously, their owner, my host, Libby. They flowed across a landscape I can only toil over. They felt like dream horses moving without noise or effort. The small herd had its own social structure and its own skills: hauling heavy loads, pulling carriages, working closely with people who know how to work with them. The idea that we know better than they do is ridiculous in their intelligent presence.
Preservation and innovation
The difference between extraction and exploitation on the one hand and recovery and regeneration on the other lies only in the connections and relationships. When felling trees leads to erosion and flooding we see a connection we were not conscious of before. A connection that gives us a choice. When we understand the ways that trees communicate under the ground and how many aspects of a forest ecosystem support each other, we have a richer notion of the more limited interventions we might want to make. Then, extraction of timber and whether it is economic in the bigger picture becomes alive for us. And here we can add that pulling the timber out using fell ponies gives much more scope for responsible stewardship.
The specific trees that can be extracted from a grove without damaging its health is a matter of particular local knowledge. It depends on many connections. It may rely on a lifetime of experience and learning. This is generalisable across craft skills. A craftsman takes into account many more connections and subtleties than a less skilled and experienced person.
In our meeting this perspective on the world was held for us by Vivian Griffiths, Libby’s brother. He was steeped in the legacy of Ruskin and William Morris. He brought Tolkien and C. S. Lewis and Owen Barfield into the conversation. The very spirit of truth and beauty in social and ecological relationships. In this spirit we can have a proper reverence for the social, cultural and personal knowledge that allows us to coexist much more happily with our ecosystem than we do at present.
We can neither simply worship the past nor believe in progress and the future. Both are failing us sufficiently to call our very survival into question. We cannot find the innovations we need without a much deeper understanding of social history and the achievements of the past that we have. And we cannot understand the significance and meaning of those continuities with the past without understanding the nature of the innovations we need to wholeheartedly commit to.
Frameworks
There is a framework of support payments to hill farmers in the Lake District that they absolutely rely on to survive. That framework may well get disrupted by the Brexit traincrash and related government incompetence. More generally, there are frameworks of incentives and disincentives that try to manage our activities across the board. What we eat, how we are educated, where we live, whatever. These frameworks are without exception too narrow and push us towards extractive and exploitative relationships and their externalisations. Someone famous said that the health industry doesn’t care about food and the food industry doesn’t care about health. That is my experience in spades.
Chris Cooke was at our meeting and held the reins for a holistic framework that could be used to understand true regeneration, to measure some of its dimensions without doing violence to the whole. Chris is accredited with the Savory Institute and we have mentioned before the work of Allan Savory especially in understanding how semi-arid grazing areas can be re-greened and how the local climate can respond to getting grazing patterns right. According to Walter Jehne this is the route of combatting global warming by understanding the role of the water cycle in planetary cooling and the sequestration of carbon back out of the atmosphere. ( https://drive.google.com/open?id=1cRxrt4VNajHyFR1rn3sQ5crXmBORUDqm )
My understanding and direct experience is that the Lake District does not suffer from a lack of rainfall. It has its droughts of course, one this last year. Much less is known about regeneration of these wet uplands than the areas of the world (particularly southern Africa and Australia) where dealing with regeneration has an existential importance and where people are learning that their very livelihood economics depend on practical understanding of regenerative practices.
The Lake District is a man-made landscape. Take for instance the ubiquitous drystone walls, which are a major element of the available shelter when the weather turns rough. Libby told us that a fell pony is the same height as a drystone wall, because ponies that are too tall can’t find enough shelter in the winter. Some aspects of the man-madeness of the landscape amount to an undermining of the ecosystems, perhaps the way that sheep interfere with the reseeding of trees. That there is damage is not denied I think and the desert lack of biodiversity speaks for itself. Whether people will understand the need for reintroduction of keystone species like wolves and lynx is more doubtful, because we don’t understand the system. Perhaps we refuse to understand the system because social relationships are not strong or trusting enough, not respectful enough.
Chris’s regeneration measurement framework may help. The connection of such insights into the social and cultural world and significance of craft skills that may already be lost in making regeneration a practical and viable proposition is a huge challenge, one that is not even on the map for most people. There is a need to change the administrative and economic frameworks that promote the wrong side of innovation and development. The ecocidal side.
Systems indeed
I have blithely used the word systems throughout this short note, when normally I avoid it as unhelpful. This meeting was called by Kerry Turner whose self-image is that of a systems thinker who uses systems dynamic models to understand the world. Followers of this blog will know that I consider that a double-edged proposition. It was Kerry who knew Libby and her passion for the ponies and all the craft around them. It was Kerry who contacted Walter Jehne in Australia who said when must contact Chris who turned out to live down the road from Libby’s wonderful house.
Nora Bateson informed the system dynamics modellers at the Club of Rome review that they would never get there with boxes and arrows. We didn’t use any boxes and arrows, or indeed any technology, in our meeting. It was a meeting of hearts and minds. Viv overlapped with my father at Durham University and the focus on social history overlapped massively with my father’s lifelong study of Methodism. I have neglected all that while I catch up with the natural history of soil and the wrong-doing of the great cultural institutions of our time. But in a world where everything is connected, all sorts of our own roots will be shown to be entangled with the roots of others. Our family project is called Wild Routes, for kids and big kids who need the wilderness, but the wildness of our cultural roots is a thing too.
Know-how is the poor cousin of externalised knowledge, the knowledge of science and the knowledge of exams. But how are we going to find our role in our ecosystem apart from know-how? Robin Wall Kimmerer asked her college class of ecologists what the positive role of humans in the ecosystem was and got no answers. We cannot succeed without that changing. Running ponies is a small part of an answer.
