HVCA’s response to the climate emergency focuses on actions to reduce carbon emissions and the green house gases that are heating our planet. This response will involve both technological and behavioural change. But in our search for solutions, we shouldn’t forget the importance of ‘natural’ processes that regulate our climate. For example, one function of water is as a vehicle of heat transport, part of the physiology of this living planet. Please watch Charles Eisenstein’s brand new animated video about how plants influence local and global temperatures through the movement of water.There is an emerging understanding among many environmentalists that we have made a scientific, strategic, rhetorical, and political error by reducing the ecological crisis to climate, and the climate crisis to carbon. Earth is best understood as a living being with a complex physiology, whose health depends on the health of her constituent organs. Her organs are the forests, the wetlands, the grasslands, the estuaries, the reefs, the apex predators, the keystone species, the soil, the insects, and indeed every intact ecosystem and every species on earth. If we continue to degrade them, drain them, cut them, poison them, pave them, and kill them, earth will die a death of a million cuts. She will die of organ failure—regardless of the levels of greenhouse gases.“Cutting down an existing solar plant, which is a tree, in order to build an artificial one is just ridiculous,” he said. “It’s more than energy. Solar doesn’t feed a single bird, it doesn’t manage the watershed.” Professor Douglas Tallamy.Three Priorities for Environmental HealingAll is not lost. There is in fact a way to “save the world.” I put it in quotes, because ultimately the choice we face is not about our survival, it is about what kind of world we choose to live in. One vibrant with life? Or a gigantic strip mine / waste dump / parking lot? So let us say instead, there is a way to regenerate a world vibrant with life. The way is to enact a reverence for life in all its forms. This translates to three priorities for environmentalist attention and funding.The first recalls traditional conservationism. We must absolutely protect any remaining intact ecosystems from development, whether it is for oil & gas, minerals, lumber, ranching, suburbs, dam reservoirs, industrial-scale fishing, or biofuels. The few remaining intact organs of Gaia are its reservoirs of biodiversity and its memory of health. Note well that to “protect” does not usually mean to fence off and keep humans away. In fact, right human participation can enhance the health of ecosystems when those humans have intimate understanding and reverence for the places where they live.The second priority is regeneration: the restoring of life to places where it has been depleted. Regenerative farming and ranching, agroforestry, marine preserves, beaver reintroduction, salmon reintroduction, dam removal, and water retention landscapes are just some of the ways to revitalize the organs of the earth and bring them back online to stabilize the climate.The third priority is detoxification. I suspect a lot of forest death (it isn’t just oaks) and insect collapse (in most places, at least 80% of insects have disappeared) is due to the ubiquity of herbicides, pesticides, toxic waste, and other pollution in the environment. It shocked me when I learned that vast areas of forest in the eastern United States are routinely sprayed to “control” pest insects. Dioxins, PFAs, antiobiotics, pharmaceutical residues, and agriculture chemicals contaminate every ecosystem on earth, every animal, every cell. They are detectable even in Antarctica. Add to these the aerial spraying of aluminum and other particles in geoengineering experiments, causing elevated levels of aluminum in place remote from any industrial source. And let’s not forget the little-recognized impact of electromagnetic pollution, light pollution, and noise pollution on ecosystems. All of the above harm earth on the tissue level, further weakening her already compromised organs.
