Our bonds with other species are as vital, to survival, as our bonds with other people. If we don’t choose our company carefully, disaster is likely to ensue.

As a species, we should be shopping for the best relationships. There’s a lot a stake, and we don’t want to be abused or neglected. When searching for a good fit, we should keep in mind the following characteristics of good relationships.

Healthy Relationships Are:

• Supportive
• Stable
• Trustworthy
• Reciprocating
• Versatile
• Low Maintenance

Any signs of abusiveness, jealousy, extreme neediness, aloofness, instability, selfishness, should be bright red flags. To satiate our needs, we require an assortment of healthy relationships, from lovers and close friends, to co-workers and acquaintances. We know that too few or too many relationships can be a bad thing.

The most conspicuous relationships of the human species involve domesticated plants and animals. Our common pets, and almost all the food items in a grocery store, are domesticated organisms. These are the barnyard plants and animals we learn about from the moment we begin to talk.

But these creatures were not always domestic. All of them descend from wild ancestors, just as dogs descended from wolves. In his book Guns, Germs, and Steel, Jared Diamond provides an excellent overview of domestication’s history. The domestication of food plants and animals was the basis of the Neolithic Revolution, when Old Word hunter/gatherers became farmers. Diamond make a good point: the reason we domesticated wolves and wheat, instead of moose, zebras, or cheetahs, is because wolves and wheat had a natural tendency to associate with people.

Wolves, for instance, probably first encountered people while scavenging meat scraps from hunting camps. Since wolves and people where both social hunters at that time, and since both species had something to gain from cooperation (increased hunting success), it was highly likely that a relationship would form.

It was the same way with plants like wheat, which probably thrived in man made disturbances before it was domesticated. Out of this relationship people gained food, and wheat gained habitat. Moose, zebras, and cheetahs don’t associate with people, if they can help it, and don’t have much to gain from a relationship.

When examining the planet’s organisms, we find a whole spectrum of tendencies for associating with people. On one side, we have animals like spotted owls and arboreal salamanders, who have very different needs from people. They want little to do with us, because we have nothing to offer them. Endangered species are likely to occupy this side of the spectrum, because, as we modify their habitat to suite us, it becomes less suitable to them.

In the middle of the spectrum are organisms that have needs and habitats similar to ours. Deer for instance, were not abundant in Western Washington State, until people began clearing the old growth forest to suite their needs. While this activity seriously threatened the spotted owl, deer thrived in the fields and thick re-growth that resulted. Similarly, apple trees have a habit of sprouting up in disturbed forests around human settlements. Since people like to eat deer and apples, this is a happy relationship, and both parties have something to gain. But an important distinction is that these species do not absolutely need us. Deer and wild apples would do fine without human help, perhaps making use of natural burn areas. (Read Northwest Lands Northwest Peoples, edited by Goble and Hirt.)

At the far end of the spectrum are organisms that need humans to survive. Corn is an excellent example. In the book The Omnivore’s Dilemma, Michael Pollan pointed out that without human intervention, corn could not even reseed itself. Helplessly, corn relies completely on people for it’s propagation. Corn is so needy, it can only survive by rewarding the humans who plant it with prodigious amounts of food. Through the hybridization and genetic modification of corn and other domestic organisms, we make them still more dependent on us. If humans quit supporting them, these organisms would cease to exist.

The Domestication Spectrum:

The most domesticated organisms in the spectrum reward us with the greatest quantities of food, but it comes a cost. Anyone who’s noticed the luxurious lifestyle of some pet dogs has witnessed that cost. I am referring to the frightening phenomenon of co-domestication.

Sure, dogs keep us company, they intimidate thieves, and they fetch the paper. But these same dogs enjoy a constant supply of free food and the freedom to sleep the entire day, while their owners slave away at full time jobs. Who has domesticated whom? This article (PDF) sheds light on how powerfully canines have shaped our species, not just vice versa.

All domestic organisms are the same way. They give more because they need more. The reason they can yield so much more than their wild counterparts is that they have differed the work of their upkeep to us. As much as we have domesticated them, they have domesticated us. We do their bidding, even when it becomes painful.

But do we want to be domesticated? Jared Diamond demonstrated that such relationships have been a primary vector for pandemic diseases throughout history. Almost every plague can be traced back to a domestic animal, even the more recent "swine flu". Domesticated animals also develop much smaller brains than their wild counterparts. Neoteny, or juvenilization, is a common trait exhibited by domesticates, a phenomenon by which adult animals retain the traits of juveniles, becoming helpless, cute, dumb, and compliant. This process can happen in as little as fifty years, as demonstrated by Dmitri Belyaev’s experiment in domesticating the silver fox. The idea that humans have been similarly tamed is a chilling one. (See http://www.primitivism.com/domestic.htm for effects of domestication.)

Have our co-domesticates made lap dogs out of us? Consider that most of the calories you consume come from just four crops. Consider that most of the carbon that comprises your body was fixed by corn. Or take a drive through Middle America and see it stretch to the horizon; corn, corn, corn, corn…. Or better yet, visit the Gulf of Mexico’s vast "dead zone" where all the fertilizer washed from the Mississippi’s corn and soybean fields accumulates, and becomes a patch of lifeless reeking sea as broad as Massachusetts. (http://serc.carleton.edu/microbelife/topics/deadzone/general.html)

Who is in charge here? Whose greed is ravishing the planet? Is it the Exxon? Is it George W. Bush? Is it Wal-Mart?!

No. It’s corn. Corn is in charge.

People are conceited enough to believe that we are the cause of this nightmare. But if our species was really in control, the world would look a lot differently. However greedy we may be, it was never in our interest to pollute and overpopulate the planet, dine on high fructose corn syrup, work long hours plowing up the soil, and cover every arable acre with wheat, rice, and corn. This is, however, very much in the interest of corn.

The human/grain relationship is the definition of unhealthy. Of all the plants we could have loved, we’ve chosen the ones that destroy our home and feed us junk. This is abusive. If we had any spine at all, we’d ditch them forever.

As a species, it’s time we had a talk with crops like corn. What we ought to be saying is, "Look Corn, things started out alright between us. I remember when we first got together in Mexico, we hung out with Beans and Squash, we made tortillas together, it was beautiful. But things aren’t the same anymore. Corn, you’ve been so draining lately. I’ve taken you everywhere and given you everything; land, water, fertilizer, herbicide, even genetic modifications – do you have any idea how many prairies and watersheds I sacrificed? I butchered the nitrogen cycle for you! And what do I have to show for it?! Corn-syrup! Lousy corn fed beef! Diabetes and heart disease! That’s what I have to show for it! And if it was up to you, I’d never have anything else. A person can’t live on cornflakes alone! Corn, I’m an omnivore, I need variety, adventure, and Omega 3 fatty acids. I don’t mind having corn on the cob now and then, but corn syrup on every label? You’re even in my gasoline! I can’t go on like this. You’re jealously is insane! This relationship isn’t working for me anymore. I think it’s time I saw other species."

What would it mean, to divorce ourselves from our co-domesticates?

A healthier relationship with our food might resemble our hunter/gatherer past, when we utilized a greater diversity of plants and animals in our diet. Hunter/gatherers across the world eat somewhere in the ballpark of 200 different plant species. We are omnivores, descended from a long line of omnivores. Even our chimpanzee cousins eat about 200 plant species. Primate intelligence may have evolved, in part, to facilitate such an eclectic diet. Ethnobotanists estimate that indigenous people from my home region, the Columbia Plateau, utilized at least 135 plants for food. When we consider how many non-native plants are available to us, as the result of global exchange, it does not seem unreasonable to demand a 300-plant diet. This is not to mention animal foods, which lag not far behind plants in hunter/gatherer diets, in terms of number of species eaten. The markets of the undeveloped world are a tantalizing example of just how much culinary variety we miss out on in the industrialized world. Broadening the scope of our menu would certainly improve our health and the health of the planet.

A healthier relationship with food might also look a little more independent. By eating from a wider swath of the domestication spectrum, and avoiding the extremes, we could spare ourselves internal and external damages. For instance, most of the vegetable greens consumed by modern Americans come from domesticated crops grown in intensively managed fields, which is totally absurd. There is no shortage of wild greens growing in our waste places, even in urban settings. Commonly overlooked "weeds" such as nettles, lambs quarter, amaranth, purslane, etc. are higher in vitamin and mineral content than their domestic counterparts, and thrive with zero maintenance. Many of these taste as good, or better, than domesticated greens (see http://www.eattheweeds.com). They are more than abundant enough to meet the vitamin and mineral needs of everyone. If we incorporated these semi-wild plants in our diets, we would waste less money and energy, and preserve our integrity as low-maintenance omnivores. Instead, most of us continue to be trapped by our bias toward tame, high-maintenance things.

Few societies are as irrational as ours in this regard. Most of the world’s other cultures have realized that while some foods are worth the effort to cultivate, others are best harvested from the wild. The hunter/gatherer Indian cultures of the Northwest were happy to adopt domestic species like chickens, potatoes, and turnips. It was no stretch. After all, they had been gardening tobacco for a very long time. But almost nothing could stop them from harvesting huckleberries, or wild salmon. Only our culture would build the Grand Coulee Dam, thus terminating a free and abundant supply of wild salmon, in order to irrigate potatoes. Most long-established agricultural societies derive a significant part of their diet from the wild. Farming corn did not keep early American societies from dining on venison and nuts as well.

Sea food, the one wild harvest industry our society wasn’t so squeamish about, is rapidly being replaced by high-maintenance fish farms, and other forms of aquaculture. On the whole, the industrial world has done a very poor job of striking a balance between low and high maintenance sustenance strategies. Indeed, we seem to have an uncanny tendency toward the latter extreme. Why? Why would we go to so much trouble? Perhaps it is because, as any government employee can tell you, make-work can be profitable (the Grand Coulee Dam makes another pertinent example). But this is an entirely different topic, perhaps better covered by Naomi Klein in her book The Shock Doctrine.

If you’re like me, make-work isn’t your forte. You’ve got better things to do than labor for things nature offers for free. You may also like the idea of moving your diet toward the healthy norm – two or three hundred plant species. Find out more about increasing the diversity of your habitat at: https://sites.google.com/site/humanhabitatproject.

Some 3,000 years ago, farmers in eastern China domesticated the soybean. In 1765, the first soybeans were planted in North America. Today the soybean occupies more U.S. cropland than wheat. And in Brazil, where it spread even more rapidly, the soybean is invading the Amazon rainforest.

For close to two centuries after its introduction into the United States the soybean languished as a curiosity crop. Then during the 1950s, as Europe and Japan recovered from the war and as economic growth gathered momentum in the United States, the demand for meat, milk, and eggs climbed. But with little new grassland to support the expanding beef and dairy herds, farmers turned to grain to produce not only more beef and milk but also more pork, poultry, and eggs. World consumption of meat at 44 million tons in 1950 had already started the climb that would take it to 280 million tons in 2009, a sixfold rise.

This rise was partly dependent on the discovery by animal nutritionists that combining one part soybean meal with four parts grain would dramatically boost the efficiency with which livestock and poultry converted grain into animal protein. This generated a fast-growing market for soybeans from the mid-twentieth century onward. It was the soybean’s ticket to agricultural prominence, enabling soybeans to join wheat, rice, and corn as one of the world’s leading crops.

U.S. production of the soybean exploded after World War II. By 1960 it was close to triple that in China. By 1970 the United States was producing three fourths of the world’s soybeans and accounting for virtually all exports. And by 1995 the fast-expanding U.S. land area planted to soybeans had eclipsed that in wheat.

When world grain and soybean prices climbed in the mid-1970s, the United States—in an effort to curb domestic food price inflation—embargoed soybean exports. Japan, then the world’s leading importer, was soon looking for another supplier. And Brazil was looking for new crops to export. The rest is history. In 2009, the area in Brazil planted to soybeans exceeded that in all grains combined.

At about the same time the soybean gained a foothold in Argentina, where it staged the most spectacular takeover of all. Today more than twice as much land in Argentina produces soybeans as produces grain. Rarely does a single crop so dominate a country’s agriculture as the soybean does Argentina’s. Together, the United States, Brazil, and Argentina produce easily four fifths of the world’s soybean crop and account for 90 percent of the exports.

During the closing decades of the last century, Japan was the leading soybean importer, at nearly 5 million tons per year. As recently as 1995, China was essentially self-sufficient in soybeans, producing and consuming roughly 13 million tons of soybeans a year. Then the dam broke as rising incomes enabled many of China’s 1.3 billion people to move up the food chain, consuming more meat, milk, eggs, and farmed fish. By 2009 China was consuming 55 million tons of soybeans, of which 41 million tons were imported, accounting for 75 percent of its soaring consumption.

Today half of all soybean exports go to China, the country that gave the world the soybean. Soybean meal mixed with grain for animal feed made it possible for Chinese meat consumption to grow to double that in the United States.

Since 1950 the world soybean harvest has climbed from 17 million tons to 250 million tons, a gain of more than 14-fold.(See data.)This contrasts with growth in the world grain harvest of less than fourfold. Soybeans are the second-ranking U.S. crop after corn, and they totally dominate agriculture in both Brazil and Argentina.

Where does the 250-million-ton world soybean crop go? One tenth or so is consumed directly as food—tofu, meat substitutes, soy sauce, and other products. Nearly one fifth is extracted as oil, making it a leading table oil. The remainder, roughly 70 percent of the harvest, ends up as soybean meal to be consumed by livestock and poultry.

So although the soybean is everywhere, it is virtually invisible, embedded in livestock and poultry products. Most of the world harvest ends up in refrigerators in such products as milk, eggs, cheese, chicken, ham, beef, and ice cream.

Satisfying the global demand for soybeans, growing at nearly 6 million tons per year, poses a challenge. The soybean is a legume, fixing atmospheric nitrogen in the soil, which means it is not as fertilizer-responsive as, say, corn, which has a ravenous appetite for nitrogen. But because the soy plant uses a substantial fraction of its metabolic energy to fix nitrogen, it has less energy to devote to producing seed. This makes raising yields more difficult.

In contrast to the impressive gains in grain yields, scientists have had comparatively little success in raising soybean yields. Since 1950, U.S. corn yields have quadrupled while those of soybeans have barely doubled. Although the U.S. area in corn has remained essentially unchanged since 1950, the area in soybeans has expanded fivefold.(See data.) Farmers get more soybeans largely by planting more soybeans. Herein lies the dilemma: how to satisfy the continually expanding demand for soybeans without clearing so much of the Amazon rainforest that it dries out and becomes vulnerable to fire.

The Amazon is being cleared both by soybean growers and by ranchers, who are expanding Brazil’s national herd of beef cattle. Oftentimes, soybean growers buy land from cattlemen, who have cleared the land and grazed it for a few years, pushing them ever deeper into the Amazon rainforest.

The Amazon rainforest sustains one of the richest concentrations of plant and animal biological diversity in the world. It also recycles rainfall from the coastal regions to the continental interior, ensuring an adequate water supply for Brazil’s inland agriculture. And it is an enormous storehouse of carbon. Each of these three contributions is obviously of great importance. But it is the release of carbon, as deforestation progresses, that most directly affects the entire world. Continuing destruction of the Brazilian rainforest will release massive quantities of carbon into the atmosphere, helping to drive climate change.

Brazil has discussed reducing deforestation 80 percent by 2020 as part of its contribution to lowering global carbon emissions. Unfortunately, if soybean consumption continues to climb, the economic pressures to clear more land could make this difficult.

Although the deforestation is occurring within Brazil, it is the worldwide growth in demand for meat, milk, and eggs that is driving it. Put simply, saving the Amazon rainforest now depends on curbing the growth in demand for soybeans by stabilizing population worldwide as soon as possible. And for the world’s affluent population, it means moving down the food chain, eating less meat and thus lessening the growth in demand for soybeans. With food, as with energy, achieving an acceptable balance between supply and demand now means curbing growth in demand rather than just expanding supply.

Further Reading:

• In Memory of Dorothy Stang
• Are You Paying to Burn the Rainforest?

Here’s an idea that should be embraced and championed by all earth repair advocates: The Buffalo Commons.

The Buffalo Commons is a conceptual proposal to create a vast nature preserve by returning 139,000 square miles (360,000 km2) of the drier portion of the Great Plains to native prairie, and by reintroducing the buffalo, or American Bison, that once grazed the short grass prairie.

The proposal originated with Frank J. Popper and Deborah Popper, who argued in a 1987 essay (PDF) that the current use of the drier parts of the plains for agriculture is not sustainable. The authors viewed the historic European-American settlement of the Plains States as hampered by lack of understanding of the ecology and an example of the "Tragedy of the Commons". Many people in potentially affected states resisted the concept during the 1990s:

There once were over 400 million acres of wild prairie grasslands in the central part of North America. The backbone of the Buffalo Commons movement is the work — over a period of decades — to re-establish and re-connect prairie wildland reserves and ecological corridors large enough for bison and all other native prairie wildlife to survive and roam freely, over great, connected distances, while simultaneously restoring the health and sustainability of our communities wherever possible so that both land and people may prosper for a very long time. Future generations may choose to expand these reserves and corridors, as the new culture of caring and belonging we have started today becomes an integral, ingrained part of life in the world of tomorrow, especially as extensive grasslands become needed to help absorb carbon from the atmosphere. (Highly biodiverse native prairies are excellent carbon sequesters.) – Buffalo Commons

It’s fascinating material and an idea worth entertaining, to say the least. The Poppers propose that a significant portion of the region be gradually shifted from farming and ranching use. They envision an area of native grassland, of perhaps 10 or 20 million acres (40,000 or 80,000 km²) in size.

Further Reading:

• From Wikipedia
• The Buffalo Commons as Regional Metaphor and Geographic Method, by Drs. Deborah E. Popper and Frank J. Popper

Often, as I’ve travelled and lived in different parts of the globe, I’ve stood on mountains and beaches and looked around, somewhat wistfully, trying to visualise how those landscapes would have looked a few centuries ago. I’m sure you’ve done it too.

Many, if not most, of these places were once vast tracts of old growth forest, with rich diversity in flora and fauna. Natural biological water cleaning systems were in place, as the hydrological cycle was efficient and largely unmolested by man. Most places still had rich, dark soils and no chemicals had yet been employed to stamp out soil life.

These were the days of 280ppm. We lived then with respect, if not even fear, for a nature wide and wonderful – never for a moment thinking we could one day be the cause of these vast and mysterious systems collapsing wholesale.

But, that was then. The industrial revolution, in combination with the exponential function that has taken the human population into a steep hockey stick incline (it took from the dawn of time until the 1800s before we reached our first billion people, but we’ve multiplied that almost seven times in the two centuries since), has landed us in a world that looks vastly different today.

Reluctantly putting visualisations aside, now as I scan the landscapes in front of me, it’s mostly just cities, tarmac and a massively inefficient waste-of-space large-scale industrial monocrop agriculture. Cycles of precipitation and transpiration have been interrupted as we’ve cut down forests, ploughed the land, and almost universally determined to pipe precious rainwater directly to the ocean. Water tables worldwide are falling and many rivers no longer reach the sea while often the land is parched, eroded and turning to desert.

And, oh, all that carbon! Razing forests and churning soils has been a mass eviction of CO2 into our atmosphere. For the last fifty years – the period we call the ‘Green Revolution’ – we’ve been hastening this process further through additions of soluble nitrogen which results in nitrous oxide emissions (almost 300x more powerful a greenhouse gas than CO2) and which is now also seen to have even further detrimental effects on remaining forests.

Our before-abundant oceans – the massive heat and CO2 buffering mechanism we’re blessed with – are now taking in far too much CO2, changing seawater’s pH to the point where it’s interfering with basic processes for crucial members of the food chain: coral, molluscs and plankton.

Over the last few years I’ve spent considerable time examining these issues. The more I dug into it, the more depressing it got – not only because it’s looking increasingly like we’ve already passed the dangerous threshold (see also) that risks systemic environmental meltdown, but also because popular understanding of the problem is so linear in view. The chain reaction of the almost global recession of glaciers and the melting of the greenland, arctic and antarctic ice sheets and permafrost are the result of greenhouse gas concentrations from the 1980s, with a lot more damage yet to occur from today’s greater concentrations (see here for a summary of today’s noted changes), and yet mitigation has been almost entirely focussed on reducing fossil fuel consumption, only. Being a little ‘less bad’ does not a positive make. We can’t just reduce our emissions, we actually need to be sequestering GHGs out of the air – now! While reducing fossil fuel consumption is imperative, highlighting this alone sidelines the far more holistic course of also reinstating our soils as the massive carbon sink they once were. Increasing soil carbon not only has significant potential to ameliorate the climate change problem, but in doing so we increase soil fertility, improve soil structure (critical for water- and oxygen-holding capacity) and productivity whilst decreasing plant disease and insect attack (think improved nutrition and less chemicals). And, significantly, if we were to take these things a little further, developing biodiverse food forests to relocalise food production, we can also increase heat reflecting cloud cover whilst repairing/reinstating the hydrological cycle that supports all life on earth.

In other words – the focus of governments has only been on reducing emissions and the focus of trigger happy geo-engineering advocates has only been on ‘adjusting’ the world to accommodate our lifestyles, whilst little thought has been given to restoring natural biological mechanisms that would do most of the work for us, better, and for free. Like many aspects of modern civilisation, we find ourselves yet again dealing with symptoms and not root causes.

It’s with these thoughts in mind that I introduce you to The Biology of Global Warming (182kb 8-page PDF), which was originally published as pages 7-14 of the Dec 2006 – Jan 2007 edition of Nature and Society, the bi-monthly journal of the Nature and Society Forum.

The key point of the document is to ask the question why CO2 emissions were already rising before we really made much, or any, headway into mining for coal and drilling for oil. The answer is obvious:

• "Substantial de-forestation and farming of the Middle East, Europe, North Africa and North America prior to 1750 resulted not only in the release of vast quantities of CO2 into the atmosphere through the burning of timber and associated loss of soil organic matter but also the destruction of the carbon bio-sequestration of these forests."
• "…the destruction of up to 80% of the earth’s primary forests by humans during industrialisation could have resulted in a marked loss of natural cooling capacity and therefore increased global warming, particularly as biological systems increasingly need to shade and cool the planet from incident solar radiation."

To acknowledge these simple facts is to get us halfway to working on actual solutions. Harness biology and natural symbiotic relationships, I say, because through imitating natural systems in our food production we can initiate a ‘geo-engineering’ program that comes without side effects or risks and that holds significant promise of providing for human need in a manner that doesn’t put our race at odds with every other organism within the biosphere.

We now have no choice but to address global warming through its primary and initial cause. We need to rapidly re-establish natural cloud albedos and their cooling effects. To do this we need to re-establish the bio-systems that provided the transpiration and cloud nucleation processes on which such cloud albedos and cooling effects naturally depend. To help restore and support these bio-systems we need to biosequester carbon in forests but particularly soils so that they may enhance the natural infiltration and retention of availability soil water on which forest transpiration and cloud albedos depend. – The Biology of Global Warming (182kb 8-page PDF)

Postscript: Although perhaps controversial, I also personally believe that in such efforts we’ll need to quit our narrow views on maintaining only native flora, and work towards building food-providing ecosystems everywhere – systems that mimic natural forests in function but that utilise productive edible plants and trees alongside non-invasive support species.

Further Reading:

• A referenced restatement of the above PDF (PDF)

by George Monbiot: journalist, author, academic and environmental and political activist, United Kingdom

For the past five years I have been at war with Farmers for Action. These are the neanderthals who have held up the traffic and blockaded the refineries in the hope of persuading the government to reduce the price of fuel. It doesn’t matter how often you explain that cheap fuel, which allows the supermarkets to buy from wherever the price of meat or grain is lowest, has destroyed British farming. They will stand in front of the cameras and make us watch as they cut their own throats.

But through gritted teeth I must admit that they have got something right. In January the caveman-in-chief, David Handley, warned that foot and mouth disease had not been eliminated from Brazil, and that imports of meat from that country risked bringing it back to Britain(1). The buyers brushed his warning aside. In the first half of this year, beef imports from Brazil to the UK rose by 70%, to 34,000 tonnes(2). Last week an outbreak was confirmed in the Brazilian state of Mato Grosso do Sul.

You would, of course, expect British producers to throw as much mud as they can at cheap imports. You would expect them to question their competitors’ hygiene standards and social and environmental impacts, and Mr Handley has done all of these things. But, to my intense annoyance, he is on every count correct.

Unlike him, I do not believe that British beef farmers have a God-given right to stay in business. We shouldn’t be eating beef at all. Because the conversion efficiency of feed to meat is so low in cattle, there is no more wasteful kind of food production. British beef producers would be extinct were it not for subsidies and European tariffs. Brazilian meat threatens them only because it is so cheap that it can outcompete theirs even after trade taxes have been paid. But if it’s unethical to eat British beef, it’s 100 times worse to eat Brazilian.

Until 1990, Brazil produced only enough beef to feed itself. Since then its cattle herd has grown by some 50 million, and the country has become, according to some estimates, the world’s biggest exporter: it now sells 1.9 million tonnes a year(3). The United Kingdom is its fourth largest customer, after Russia, Egypt and Chile(4). One region is responsible for 80% of the growth in Brazilian beef production. It’s the Amazon(5).

The last three years have been the most destructive in the Brazilian Amazon’s history. In 2004, 26,000 square kilometres of rainforest were burnt: the second highest rate on record(6). This year could be worse. And most of it is driven by cattle ranching.

According to the Center for International Forestry Research, cattle pasture accounts for six times more cleared land in the Amazon than cropland: even the notorious soya farmers [see clip at bottom], who have ploughed some five million hectares of former rainforest, cover just one tenth of the ground taken by the beef producers(7). The four Amazon states in which the most beef is produced are the four with the highest deforestation rates.

Cattle ranching, if it keeps expanding in the Amazon, threatens two-fifths of the world’s remaining rainforest. This is not just the most diverse ecosystem, but also the biggest reserve of standing carbon. Its clearance could provoke a hydrological disaster in South America, as rainfall is reduced as the trees come down. Next time you see footage of the forest burning, remember that you might have paid for it.

Many Brazilians, especially those whose land is being grabbed by the cattlemen, are trying to stop the destruction. The ranchers have an effective argument: when people complain, they kill them. In February we heard an echo of the massacre which has so far claimed 1200 lives(8), when the American nun Dorothy Stang was murdered – almost certainly by beef producers. The ranchers believed to have killed her were, like cattlemen throughout the Amazon, protected by the police(9).

For the same reason, and despite the best efforts of President Lula, the ranchers are now employing some 25,000 slaves on their estates(10). These are people who are transported thousands of miles from their home states, then – forced to buy their provisions from the ranch shop at inflated prices – kept in permanent debt. Because of the expansion of beef production in the Amazon, slavery in Brazil has quintupled in ten years(11).

So a government which – despite its best efforts – has failed to stop slavery, murder and environmental catastrophe, expects us to believe that its farm hygiene standards are as rigorously enforced as those of any other nation. Anyone who has worked in the Amazon knows that there is no certificate which cannot be bought, and few local officials who aren’t working for the people they are meant to regulate. If foot and mouth disease is endemic in the Brazilian Amazon – most of which is now registered by the government as “safe” – the ministers in Brasilia will be the last to know.

When the disease last hit the UK, in February 2001, it was blamed by the British government on meat imported by Chinese restaurants. But in April of that year, we discovered that the farm on which the outbreak started, at Heddon-on-the-Wall in Northumberland, had been taking slops for its pigs from the Whitburn army training camp near Sunderland(12). The army had been importing some of its beef from Brazil and Uruguay, two of the strongholds of the type O strain which infected our herds. The ministry of defence insisted that it came from “disease-free regions” of South America. One of them was Mato Grosso do Sul, the state in which foot and mouth has just erupted.

So who, in this country, has been buying it? Tesco says that “well over 90%” of its beef comes from the UK. It has stopped buying Brazilian since the outbreak last week, but can’t tell me how much it bought before then, because that’s “commercially sensitive”(13). I went round one of its stores and found that all the fresh beef was labelled “British” in big red letters. But six of its own-brand processed meals (generally the cheaper kinds) contained “South American beef”, three contained “South American/EU beef” and one just “beef”. Most of the brands supplied by other companies contained only “beef”(14).

Sainsbury’s admitted to buying 5% from Brazil until the disease was reported(15). The man from Asda told me his chain bought “less than 2%” of its beef from Brazil this summer and nothing since(16). The main market, he claimed, is restaurants and pub chains. I tried Mcdonalds and Burger king: they both say they don’t buy from Brazil. So does the pub company Wetherspoons. Punch Taverns doesn’t buy food, but its tenants are supplied by catering companies such as Brake Brothers. Brake Brothers admits to buying Brazilian beef, but the volume is, again, “competitively sensitive”(17). This doesn’t necessarily mean that any of these firms have been buying beef from the Amazon: but buying beef from elsewhere in Brazil creates a hole in the domestic market, which will be filled by the growing production in the rainforest. So, given that we’re importing tens of thousands of tonnes a year, where has it gone? Where’s the beef?

Perhaps the Guardian’s readers could help me locate it. Unlike other meat, fresh beef’s country of origin must – because of BSE – be printed on the packet. So, with a little detective work in shops and supermarkets and round the back of pubs, schools, hospitals and barracks, it shouldn’t be too hard to trace. Once you’ve found it, I suggest you back away.

References:

1. No author, 5th January 2005. FFA calls for Brazilian import ban. Farmers’ Weekly.
2. The Meat and Livestock Commission, 12th August 2005. European Market Survey 05/31.
3. Dan Buglass, 12th October 2005. Brazil on alert after foot and mouth case. The Herald.
4. The Meat and Livestock Commission, ibid.
5. David Kaimowitz, Benoit Mertens, Sven Wunder and Pablo Pacheco, 2004. Hamburger Connection Fuels Amazon Destruction: Cattle ranching and deforestation in Brazil’s Amazon. Center For International Forestry Research

   http://www.cifor.cgiar.org/publications/pdf_files/media/Amazon.pdf

6. William Laurence, 15th October 2005. Razing Amazonia. New Scientist.
7. ibid.
8. Gareth Chetwynd, 2nd April 2005. ‘Broad conspiracy’ behind nun’s killing in Brazil. The Guardian.
9. Ibid.
10. Larry Rohter, 25th March 2002. Brazil’s Prized Exports Rely on Slaves and Scorched Land. The New York Times.
11. ibid.
12. Joe Murphy, 29th April 2001. Army ’caused original foot and mouth infection’. The Telegraph.
13. John Church, Tesco press officer, 17th October 2005.
14. Tesco, Cowley Road, Oxford, 17th October 2005.
15. Sainsbury’s press office, 14th October 2005.
16. Asda press office, 14th October 2005.
17. Simon Henrick, Brake Brothers, 14th October 2005.

Recently whilst filming at Mulloon Creek Natural Farms near Canberra we spotted a lone figure in the barren landscape quietly digging a series of holes on a 2 kilometer stretch of swales that were designed by Geoff Lawton. Matt Kilby has been on the farm now for 12 months and in that time has developed a system of giving the trees he plants a successful start to life. Planting trees in heavily compacted soil is not easy as Matt will tell you, but it can be done if you follow some basic tips. In this video Matt explains the right way to plant a tree on a swale, especially if it’s located in a fairly inhospitable landscape and how to make sure that the trees you plant have a high success rate. The pink tree guards that Matt created are not cosmetic. They have a particular part to play in speeding plant growth as Matt explains.

Matt’s life is trees. He’s been inspired by the words of Richard St. Barbe Baker’s book “My Life, My Trees” and is determined to build a beautiful oasis on this planet by planting as many trees as he can. Matt has a vision of this planet and it’s a beautiful one. Where some people see problems, Matt sees a lush food forest fed by a cleverly designed water harvesting swale. A model of sustainable design.

Visit Matt’s website at treesforearth.com.au and say “G’day Matt, Well done!”

Exchange the word ‘dam’ in this post for ‘pond-that’s-formed-by-a-dam-wall’, and you’ll get what we antipodeans mean

Photographs copyright © Craig Mackintosh

A few days ago I spotted Geoff wearing a t-shirt with the message "Born to Fish, Forced to Work" emblazoned across the chest. After the swimming pool conversion story I ran a few days ago, I wanted to capture Geoff pulling in one of his own fish, from the dam that is literally just a few metres from the kitchen here at Zaytuna. But, like the t-shirt says, work keeps getting in the way. Trying to save the planet seems to keep one occupied, for some reason.

Anyway, as luck would have it, today I discovered someone who isn’t forced to work – a lad named Thomas, son of Greg Knibbs, who many of you will know (Greg co-taught a PDC in Melbourne with Bill Mollison and our Geoff last September/October). Young Thomas caught four fish today, the largest of which you can see below – a nice plump bass.

I’d heard there were fish lurking in those depths, but except for a few suspicious looking ripples around dawn and dusk, I had no proof until today. Geoff is convinced there are a few twice this size just waiting for his turn, so let’s hope we can photograph one of these another time….

This particular dam, one of several on the property, is seven years old. Before an excavator dug it up, it was just grassland. Now, as well as the fish that Geoff introduced a few years ago, it attracts a great deal of wildlife – cormorants, herons, wild ducks (and our own ducks and geese), and even a couple of shy turtles I haven’t been sneaky enough to photograph yet. I’m personally keen to see some Platypuses move in as well.

On one side of the dam is a food forest, on another some grasses. Each of these attract their own litany of wildlife, and all of these together create ‘edges’ (where two elements or habitats meet each other – like where sea meets land, or shallow water meets deeper water, etc.). Edges are the most productive places, as they allow different species (of plant, fish, animal, insect, etc.) to interact with each other, and the dam is a great example of this. Its non-uniform bottom means there’s a depth to suit many kinds of plants and fish. The dam, the forest, and their contents all work together, along with wider ranging visitors, as a self-sustaining ‘organism’ – a microcosm of ‘gaia’, of planet earth itself. Nothing is wasted, all serve a purpose.

a bellbird drops nutrients into the forest

And, we take from the system, by harvesting fish, but give back also – just a little mind you – by merely being observant in 1) the creation of the system (simply assembling elements to mimic naturally formed ponds) and 2) its management – which really involves no management if step one has been performed well.

a cormorant dries his (or her) wings after feeding in the dam

Thinking about self-sufficient systems, fish, and being forced to work, reminds me of the story of the American investment banker who thought he’d offer a ‘poor’ Mexican fisherman some sage business advice. I’ll leave you with this simple but sententious message, which I’ll put below as both just text for those with low bandwidth, and as a YouTube clip:

An American investment banker was at the pier of a small coastal Mexican village when a small boat with just one fisherman docked. Inside the small boat were several large yellowfin tuna. The American complimented the Mexican on the quality of his fish and asked how long it took to catch them.

The Mexican replied, "only a little while."

The American then asked why didn’t he stay out longer and catch more fish?

The Mexican said he had enough to support his family’s immediate needs.

The American then asked, "but what do you do with the rest of your time?"

The Mexican fisherman said, "I sleep late, fish a little, play with my children, take siestas with my wife, Maria, stroll into the village each evening where I sip wine, and play guitar with my amigos. I have a full and busy life."

The American scoffed, "I am a Harvard MBA and could help you. You should spend more time fishing and with the proceeds, buy a bigger boat. With the proceeds from the bigger boat, you could buy several boats. Eventually you would have a fleet of fishing boats. Instead of selling your catch to a middleman you would sell directly to the processor, eventually opening your own cannery. You would control the product, processing, and distribution. You would need to leave this small coastal fishing village and move to Mexico City, then LA and eventually New York City, where you will run your expanding enterprise."

The Mexican fisherman asked, "But, how long will this all take?"

To which the American replied, "15 – 20 years."

"But what then?" Asked the Mexican.

The American laughed and said, "That’s the best part. When the time is right you would announce an IPO and sell your company stock to the public and become very rich, you would make millions!"

"Millions – then what?"

The American said, "Then you would retire. Move to a small coastal fishing village where you would sleep late, fish a little, play with your kids, take siestas with your wife, stroll to the village in the evenings where you could sip wine and play your guitar with your amigos."

Okay, I lied. I’ll actually leave you with The Gospel of Consumption, as it takes the thoughts found in the story above, and fills it out even more completely. It’s a very worthy read if you’re not… er… forced to go and work now. In which case it is an especially worthy and appropriate read.

As a photographer, I was totally engrossed in the imagery – mostly shot from above, and almost entirely in the magic hours of morning and evening light – as this production gives us a vision of this world we call home that is hard to forget. It also leaves one feeling like part of the human fabric – part of the larger human family that, when you come right down to it, all depends on our planet and its immense (albeit dwindling) diversity to supply our universal, basic needs.

As a writer, that has covered the many converging issues we’re now facing – water, soil, biodiversity, deforestation, peak oil, climate change, etc. – the facts shared are also on target and up-to-date. And, again, beautifully and graphically presented.

Why I say ‘almost perfect’ is because it is only the last ten or fifteen minutes where the documentary turns about in a bid to leave the viewer feeling optimistic before it’s all over. Here it truly fails. Ultimately, it graphically and beautifully tells the tale of humankind’s misguided and unsustainable attempts at finding satisfaction – but delivers only a warm, fuzzy, nebulous feeling of how we’re to retreat from the cliff edge we’re teetering over. Despite its shortcomings, however, I give kudos to all who put it together and for their willingness to freely distribute it to as many people as possible. It’s definitely a must-watch.

‘Home’ trailer

Watch the full documentary here

Also available in Arabic, French, German, Russian and Spanish.

Duration: 1:27:31

by George Monbiot: journalist, author, academic and environmental and political activist, United Kingdom

I live a few miles from Cardigan Bay. Whenever I can get away, I take my kayak down to the beach and launch it through the waves. Often I take a handline with me, in the hope of catching some mackeral or pollock. On the water, sometimes five kilometres from the coast, surrounded by gannets and shearwaters, I feel closer to nature than at any other time.

Cardigan Bay, Wales

Last year I was returning to shore through a lumpy sea. I was 200 metres from the beach and beginning to worry about the size of the breakers when I heard a great whoosh behind me. Sure that a wave was about to crash over my head, I ducked. But nothing happened. I turned round. Right under my paddle a hooked grey fin emerged. It disappeared. A moment later a bull bottlenose dolphin exploded from the water, almost over my head. As he curved through the air, we made eye contact. If there is one image that will stay with me for the rest of my life, it is of that sleek gentle monster, watching me with his wise little eye as he flew past my head. I have never experienced a greater thrill, even when I first saw an osprey flying up the Dyfi estuary with a flounder in its talons.

The Cardigan Bay dolphins are one of the only two substantial resident populations left in British seas. It is partly for their sake that most of the coastal waters of the bay are classified as special areas of conservation (SACs). This grants them the strictest protection available under EU law. The purpose of SACs is to prevent “the deterioration of natural habitats … as well as disturbance of the species for which the areas have been designated”(1).

That looks pretty straightforward, doesn’t it? The bay is strictly protected. It can’t be damaged, and the dolphins and other rare marine life can’t be disturbed. So why the heck has a fleet of scallop dredgers been allowed to rip it to pieces?

Until this Sunday, when the season closed, 45 boats were raking the bay, including places within the SACs, with steel hooks and chain mats. The dredges destroy everything: all the sessile life of the seabed, the fish that take refuge in the sand; the spawn they lay there, reefs, boulder fields, marine archaeology – any feature that harbours life. In some cases they penetrate the seafloor to a depth of three feet. It is ploughed, levelled and reduced to desert. It will take at least 30 years for parts of the ecosystem to recover; but the structure of the seabed is destroyed forever. The noise of the dredges pounding and grinding over the stones could scarcely be better calculated to disturb the dolphins.

The boats are not resident here. They move around the coastline trashing one habitat after another. They will fish until there is nothing left to destroy then move to the next functioning ecosystem. If, in a few decades, the scallops here recover, they’ll return to tear this place up again.

The economic damage caused by these 45 boats is far greater than the money they make. They wreck all the other fisheries; not only because they destroy the habitats and kill the juvenile fish, but also because they rip out the crab and lobster pots they cross. We deplore slash and burn farming in the rainforests for its short-termism and disproportionate destruction. But this is just as bad.

Ever since the boats arrived, local people, led by the Friends of Cardigan Bay, have been campaigning to stop this pillage. After months of dithering, in March the Countryside Council for Wales advised the regional fisheries committee to stop the dredging. The committee’s chief executive refused on the grounds that its powers “are not terrifically explicit” and “the precautionary principle is a vague term, and we don’t really know how we define it.”(2) He postponed any decision until June 12th – which is a fortnight after the season ended. In 24 years of journalism I have not come across a starker example of bureaucratic cowardice.

What hold does the fishing industry have over our ministers and officials? Does it sink the bodies of their political opponents? Does it supply them with call girls and cocaine? The UK fishing sector has an annual turnover of £570m a year(3). This is less than half the size of the potato processing industry(4). Yet no one has the guts to defy it.

The story is the same all over the world. Next week, on June 8th, The End of the Line will be released in UK cinemas(5). It’s an excoriating, shocking film about the collapse of global fisheries, and the utter uselessness of the people who are supposed to protect them. It follows the journalist Charles Clover as he struggles to understand why no one is prepared to act. After several years of trying, he talks to the manager of Nobu restaurants, to ask why he is still selling meat from one of the most endangered species on earth, the bluefin tuna. The man refuses to take it off the menu, but says he’ll warn his customers that bluefin is “environmentally challenged”(6). But why is it left to restauranteurs to decide whether or not an endangered species should be allowed to survive?

As the film shows, the EU’s scientists recommend a bluefin catch one and a half times as big as it should be; the European Commission then doubles it and the fishermen then take twice as much as the Commission allows. The Mediterranean fleet now catches one third of that sea’s entire bluefin tuna population every year: at current catch rates, it will be extinct by 2012(7). There’s a total absence of enforcement, as even the most blatant illegal practices, like using spotter planes to find the shoals, are ignored by fisheries officials. Worse still, these pirate boats are subsidised by us. Aside from payments by national governments, fishing fleets in Europe are being given E3.8bn of EU money over seven years(8). There has been a total failure to make these payments conditional on fishing sustainably or even legally.

The EU now recognises that its fisheries management has been a disaster. Its green paper admits that 88% of European fish stocks are overexploited and 30% have collapsed(9). Its quota system encourages the dumping of millions of tonnes of dead fish at sea, while its efforts to reduce the fishing fleet’s capacity haven’t kept pace with technology. “In several Member States,” the paper reports, “the cost of fishing to the public budgets exceeds the total value of the catches.”(10) Last week, European fisheries ministers agreed a radical reform of the Common Fisheries policy by 2012, just in time for the extinction of the bluefin tuna.

Of course, as I have seen in Cardigan Bay, it doesn’t matter what they say they’ll do if no one is prepared to enforce it. Our marine ecosystems will continue to be ripped apart until governments stand up to the mysterious power of the fishermen.

Trailer for The End of the Line

References:

1. European Council, 21st May 1992. Directive 92/43/EEC on the conservation of natural habitats and of wild fauna and flora; Article 6.2.
   http://eur-lex.europa.eu/LexUriServ/LexUriServ.do?uri=CONSLEG:1992L0043:20070101:EN:PDF
2. http://endoftheline.com/blog/archives/334
3. http://www.statistics.gov.uk/abi/fishing.asp
4. http://www.statistics.gov.uk/abi/subsection_da.asp
5. http://endoftheline.com/
6. http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/wordofmouth/2009/may/27/nobu-blue-fin-tuna-menu
7. http://www.reuters.com/article/environmentNews/idUSTRE53D00320090414
8. European Commission, 2006. The European Fisheries Fund 2007-2013. http://ec.europa.eu/fisheries/publications/FEP_EN.pdf
9. European Commission, 22nd April 2009. Green Paper: Reform of the Common Fisheries Policy. COM(2009)163 final.
   http://eur-lex.europa.eu/LexUriServ/LexUriServ.do?uri=COM:2009:0163:FIN:EN:PDF
10. ibid.