Where does health flow from?
How do you grow a specific plant? Well, you plant a seed or seedling in soil adjusted to suit that plant and the water and weed it, right? Maybe.
How does a person become diseased? They are infected by “germs” that multiply within their body to produce the symptoms of that disease, right? Maybe.
How does soil become fertile to growing plants? You add organic matter and nutrients and plough and harrow it right? Probably not.
How does an animal come to look really glossy and healthy? You feed it a balanced diet and supplement it with vitamins and minerals right? Probably not.
What is the connection between these questions? What links them in a way that makes the questions misplaced and even redundant? This starts to have a political edge. Florence Nightingale was not welcome in the Crimea, no matter how many lives she saved. Almost no-one wants to save the planet by allowing pastoral economies to flourish or the power of the commons to become widespread.
Focus and attention
It is maybe Edward Hall who describes in detail the difference between how a westerner scans a picture or a scene and how someone with an eastern culture does. A westerner looks at the subject of the picture, at what is framed. An eastern person looks at the context, the background, at the way the subject is framed. They want clues as to what the meaning of the subject is in this context.
There is no such thing as the essentials of a subject, of a thing. Everything important is in how that subject relates to possibly multiple contexts. For instance, when I ask about a specific plant, all the important questions are about the symbiotic relationships that the plant has with soil organisms. There is an approach to growing healthy plants that requires us to observe the locality, as many difference microclimates as possible, scanning for plants that are obviously thriving and healthy. Samples of the soil these plants are growing in can be used to propagate the micro-organisms that have made great partnerships with those plants.
How do you grow a specific plant? Well, you find it a set of the best friends available locally and give the whole system an opportunity to thrive. It will be as true to say that the particular plant tells you about the soil as it will be to say that the soil is what the plant needs. Subject and context and the myriad relationships between them.
How does a person become diseased? Are they unlucky acquiring some germs? Should have worn a mask? Or are they stressed out, lacking sleep, metabolically challenged from what they eat, lacking an environment that trains their immune system, short on exercise and sun? Indeed, are they in an industrial healthcare environment that betrays them into abuse by pharmaceutical companies in the name of health?
I once had some advice from a business colleague with serious psychological insight. He said it was OK to accept a lift in car from someone who was not a good driver or who was too tired, but I should never accept a lift from someone who I was not sure wanted to live. Life will preserve itself in ways that are unfathomable to us, but when that life force wanes, myriad accidents are waiting to happen.
We are not basically stable discrete beings who will continue to live healthily unless we encounter something unfortunate. We are a miracle of dynamic balance, able to protect ourselves from everything in a normal environment and even to turn most challenges to our own advantage.
The sea and the swimmer
There is another related way to change our focus. To most people it is blindingly obvious that there are humans and animals and plants and insects and soil and its microbiology. These things seem obviously separate even if they depend on each other in interesting ways. This mode of thinking has its blindspots, particularly in the way is seems that the existence of, for instance an animal, perhaps a cow, can be abstracted and understood as a significant cog.
The context question would be something like this: how much of the critical environment that allows a cow to function as a cow is in common with how the soil works, how a plant works, how a person works? How much overlap for instance is there between the microbiomes in all the different subjects we choose to focus on? Or can the subjects, so seemingly distinct, be seen as expressions of a system that need to be whole before anything works?
Our notions of looking after a cow, as though a cow was an obvious discrete object to be cared for needs revising. It is a commonplace for gardeners to say, ‘feed the soil not the plant’. We can improve the apparent economics of farming by putting thousands of cows in a big shed together, but the usual industrial caveats apply that we have only exported costs onto others. We also need to look after the soil to raise the cow and, if we get it right, the cow will play a large part in looking after the soil.
If we need plants and animals raised on healthy soil for our own microbiomes to function well, then the separation between ourselves and the animals and plants is not what we think. And if we factor in the insects, the teeming microbiology of the soil, and the effects on the microclimate and on the local community, then talking about the health of cows starts to be a nonsense. The moment we try to manage the health of an animal or indeed of ourselves as a discrete part of the system, we have lost it.
Death by a thousand cuts
We work in the world of agriculture and food by gashes. Everything we do creates wounds in the system we are trying to work with or work against. We plough, we spray, we breed, we become more efficient, we burn, we eliminate, we exploit. A surgeon may create a gash to help heal a sick patient, but we just slash and don’t even monitor the effect on the ecosystem. When the system gets sick it needs more gashes to deal with pests and diseases.
There are people in the world, a tiny number of people, who know that it doesn’t have to be like this. It is possible to protect and nurture the health of the soil and plants and animals and ourselves and it turns out in many cases even to be economically attractive. But it is not our model and the interdependence of people in communities and land in a watershed can undermine the best efforts. If someone steals or pollutes your water or wrecks the local microclimate or allows infectious diseases to spread unchecked, you have a problem that the ecosystem will not solve for itself.
Conversely the ecosystem will become rapidly more diverse and resilient given half a chance. Scoop a pond and the amphibians will be there. Give the pasture a rest and wildflowers not seen for twenty years will populate it. Plant some trees in the right place and the water cycle will support more plant growth and more soil fertility. Move ruminants rapidly through the landscape and carbon will build in the soil. Supply a service in the community and get offers of help when you need it most.
Sick animals, rank weeds, sour soil, plagues of insects, drought — all require a response. Often there is official sanction dictating what must happen. But all too often the response will perpetuate the larger problem. It will be a new gash, a wound that solves one problem and creates ten more. We say our hands are forced but really, we are lashing out. I can feel this in my own emotion when rabbits, squirrels, rats, foxes are visibly and gallingly out of control. We haven’t got to the bottom of what avian flu is and why it occurs, but it is certainly a symptom of gashes and it is getting rapidly worse: the control measures do not work.
To go back to Florence Nightingale, working on the roots of how people and other organisms can heal and flourish is unlikely to be welcome, let alone popular. There is too much investment in the technology of the gashes, too much emotional investment in responding to crises in ways that usher in new problems. We have not been educated to be stewards. We don’t easily rein in our hubris.
Living our part
If we take the humble opposite view, we are part of ecosystems that have evolved over the millennia to have a particular niche for us as human animals. The ecosystem will support a much more vigorous and robust health in us, but not as consumers making arbitrary consumer choices. The supermarket is a lie that will kill us.
We need to understand two things: the services we rest on and the services we provide. Neither are arbitrary choices. We have evolved to eat certain things and in doing so help balance the ecosystem in certain ways. We must eat ruminants, let’s say cows, and we can’t keep them in big sheds. We can’t understand those imperatives by doing randomised controlled trials (RCTs) on humans or cows: we need to see how the system heals itself and flourishes when we get it right. An RCT is itself a gash of course; a gash in our thinking and our practice.
The truth of what needs to be allowed to happen and to be stewarded is clearer in the microbiota than it is in the cow and the human. If we can see what is shared and how it is shared, we are more likely to be able to understand our role. There is some research and documentation into what is shared and its importance, but of course how it is shared is a lived question. We feed the soil, we grow plants and trees, we graze animals and birds, we eat eggs, drink milk. We interact physically with animals and plants and soil. We eat meat and organs.
Culturally we have lost much of this. We are separated from our food and drink by myths and taboos about hygiene. Instead of understanding that we are part of a sea of micro-organisms that we depend on both statically and for our evolution, we try to defend ourselves against the world we need to steward. This is a mistake of almost insurmountable proportions.
Signs and portents
Killing animals is a rubicon for many people. Senseless destruction of animals should indeed be a moral problem for us. But killing what we need to eat and are evolved to eat is something we need to respect and honour. We are not human if we cannot play our ecosystem roles. If we are revulsed by the act of killing we have not understood, and it can be a sign to us that we need to immerse ourselves further. Of course, raising the animals that will be food for ourselves and our communities is a way to understand more fully and in a more embodied way.
When human populations are sick and animal populations are sick and plants are sick, the ecosystem is not working right. Its function is to keep everything interconnected and healthy. Part of the recipe for regenerating soil health is to search locally for a wide range of plants that are thriving, collect soil from around each, and use particular plants, such as C4 grasses, to nurture and propagate the soil micro-organisms in those samples before spreading them more widely. We can take places that have escaped the impact of our gashes to start to rebuild.
Pharmaceutical interventions do not lead to human health. Agricultural interventions do not lead to plant and animal health. We need to pay attention to plant thriving and animal thriving and indeed to joy if we are to find a way out of the mess we create ever more intensely.
Watch natural cycles intensely. Drink raw milk. Walk barefoot. Smell the compost. Celebrate worms and vermicast. Search for evidence of our invisible living foundations.
