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Build Soil
You should check out BuildSoil's chestnuts project. Jordan is a soil scientist who is undertaking a project across North America to plant 1 million edible chestnut trees.
It's also Jordan's birthday today, and the project could really use some support!
buildsoil.net/donate http://venmo.com/buildsoil http://ko-fi.com/buildsoil
BuildSoil is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit and donations are tax-deductible.
In the future I see, we will find ourselves with moving & still water everywhere. Rather than hiding water or helping it to move away as quick as possible, we hold it high & prominent in our landscape. Every home connected to water. Catching it and storing it in ponds, using swales, planning better roads...
There are many communities that already are built with this understanding, always the targets of imposed imperial artifice that we call home. It’s sits on top the landscape A machine that turns ecology into its component parts atomizing all of us. Cages sold as homes and towns.
What would we be if our common goal was the improvement of water from the back door outward- the raising of soil, the expansion of the foundations of life?
One example I love is the Satoyama system; an integration of landscapes, with towns, rivers, canals, fields, forests, and wildlife. Here’s one good film on it.
There is a real deficit in our culture's knowledge of overall landscape processes. I'm working hard to make sure that people get at least an exposure to the ways that different scales of process interact with each other.
One way this manifests is my first piece of advice in looking at an area of land - "walk down to the creek/river and get a sense of it's form." Oftentimes, I hear: "there is no river or creek" and this shows that they think the land ends at the property boundary. Everywhere is a watershed.
Uplands landscapes are shaped by water processes, and understanding the creek will help you understand what's going on upland. It's also a good idea to get a sense of the ridges- the roof of the watershed. Then walk over to the tops of the valleys.
Find the floodplains, which are supposed to be the areas that rivers flood, in order to release energy and drop sediment. A healthy river pours into a floodplain every couple years. Vegetation in the floodplain should support helping the water spread and soak.
If the river is incised- not allowed to leave it's channel- there is energy not being released during big events, and it will be expressed somehow: probably bad flooding elsewhere, but also further incision and the dropping of the river channel, which takes ground water with it.
A hungry river begins to meander or tear at it's sides, because it has to do something with all the extra energy. Rather than helping build soil like in a healthy flood event, it takes it away.
We can improve water infiltration & the holding capacity of the uplands above a flood plain, to soak & slow that water, to spread it's flow out through the year- so the river has less energy (to cause erosion). Vegetation, soils, meandering swales, ponds, well designed roads, can all move excess water into storage.
Don’t put a lot of energy into absorbing fatalist stories about climate change. We need you to stay wake to reality and engage in even small soilutions.
Jay Griffiths brings our attention to what dwells beneath our feet, inviting us to remember that soil is what turns the Earth’s barren rock into the riotous life we know.
As we prepare our gardens for the warm months ahead in the Northern Hemisphere, we revisit an essay where Jay Griffiths brings our attention to what dwells in that rich soil beneath our feet.
This is a good read. we have a moral responsibility to point out that if civilizations fall by using up their soil, then they sustain themselves by prioritizing their soil.
We must redesign and reorient ever thing we do to shift to building soil.
In the book Another Kind of Garden, the methods of Jean Pain are revealed. He spent his entire short
In the book Another Kind of Garden, the methods of Jean Pain are revealed.
He spent his entire short-lived life studying brush land and forest protection, specifically fire prevention, alongside his wife Ida. These studies led to an enormous amount of practical knowledge for composting, heating water, as well as harvesting methane, all of which are by-products of maintaining a forest or brush land with fire prevention techniques. While this knowledge is applicable in many instances, it is worth remembering that the root of all of this knowledge lies in forest preservation.
All of the activities described below are by-products of that process. The book goes into detail with the economics of such an operation. I will focus on the applications...
It's time to take soil seriously. As the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change states with very high confidence in its latest report, land degradation represents "one of the biggest and most urgent challenges" that humanity faces.
The report assesses potential impacts of climate change on food production and concludes that rising atmospheric carbon dioxide levels will reduce crop yields and degrade the nutritional quality of food.
To avert climate catastrophe, the report warns, people need to make changes in agriculture and land use. In other words, it's no longer enough to wean society off of fossil fuels. Stabilizing the climate will also require removing carbon from the sky. Rethinking humanity's relationship to the soil can help on both scores...
https://phys.org/news/2019-08-soil-climate.html
