I don’t know how to talk about climate change.
We may as well get this settled right now. After all, we’re going to be talking about climate change for a few weeks here, and it falls to me to at least get the conversation started. But while I may be the sort of person who likes to extol folks in the room with so many things I know something about, I tend to fall fairly quiet when it comes to climate. It is not, as I’ve said before, my wheelhouse.
Something that’s very interesting about this dynamic is not that I quibble over the facts and the science on climate. Nor that I have blissfully plunged my head beneath the surface with so many other ostriches who wish to pretend it is not, in fact, a thing. It’s not even that I am disinterested.
I care quite deeply about the plight in which we find ourselves, wishing to rescue and rehabilitate a suffering earth. I do the things that seem within my reach to minimize my own impact. I try to minimize the amount of waste I generate, and recycle what I can’t avoid (even if I do tend to think recycling has become a good bit of smoke and mirrors). I choose to live where I can walk or ride a bicycle to most necessary or desired destinations. For those times I do need to drive, I have a car that is small enough it might fit inside the average full size SUV. I keep my heat and air conditioning set outside common margins of comfort and make other, less fuel-consuming adjustments.
Even so, these small actions feel like a bare minimum, most days not even much of an inconvenience and a very far cry from what seems to be the requisite sacrifice needed to begin to solve for a looming crisis. And they also feel like they accomplish very little, on the scale of one person, one trash receptacle, one small gasoline-powered car.
This may explain some of why the cat seems content to have taken my tongue when it comes to climate. It feels too vast, too intractable, and so, too unspeakable.
Not long into the introduction to The Reindeer Chronicles, I fell upon a way of thinking about all this that could possibly work for me. I shouldn’t say “fell upon.” Clearly, it is author Judith Schwartz’s intent that readers discover a way of possibility, and to say “fell upon” makes it sound like sheer happenstance. Or that she tripped me, neither of which is true. In this book, Schwartz tells stories of healing the earth, of undoing damage, of rehabilitation and restoration, showing over and over in the most beautiful of ways that the crisis is not intractable, that it is not unspeakable.
But before even reaching the wonder of the stories, we looked first at the ecosystem. And this is where, for me, it truly becomes speakable. I don’t have to talk about the whole planet. I don’t even have to talk about climate. I don’t have to know if we’re calling it global warming or climate change or climate breakdown. I can just talk about a single ecosystem. The beauty of the ecosystem is it is connected to everything else. I can talk about it all without having to get my hands around it all. It becomes speakable in large part because a small solution can become scalable.
Schwartz quotes permaculture designer Geoff Lawton as saying that “All the world’s problems can be solved in a garden.”
He doesn’t mean a single garden, of course. And he’s also not a pie-in-the-sky Ted Talk idealist. As Schwartz notes, he is credited with creating a food forest in a Middle Eastern desert. But he does mean that what we do in a garden has implications beyond giving me a juicy tomato and sun-warmed cucumber for lunch. What happens in an ecosystem never stays in an ecosystem, and what we do in a garden can have farther reaching impacts on the soil, on the water cycle, and even on the sun.
Her point, in this and every other story, is that if we want to make something happen, we need only start where we are.
I have started, right? I am recycling and reducing and even though I’m not so good at reusing, I do what’s within my reach. But Schwartz is quick to point out that there are actions that can create benefits far beyond preservation and conservation. The heart of her book and its healing accounts is in regeneration.
Schwartz cites Dr. Millán Millán, a climatologist who previously directed the Center for Environmental Studies of the Mediterranean (CEAM), in explaining that “most of today’s weather extremes are not due to greenhouse heating but to ‘local impacts going wild.'”
The crisis we face is not as simple as an emissions problem, Schwartz explains. She writes, “Climate change is best understood as the manifestations of disrupted carbon, water, nutrient, and energy cycles.”
What Dr. Millán is telling us, Schwartz explains, is that “ecological restoration in pivotal areas can reinstate water circulation and bring weather patterns back toward longstanding norms. He says strategically revegetating even a small expanse of land can make a difference in the surrounding region.”
As if directly answering my conundrum about climate being out of my wheelhouse, Schwartz writes that “Earth repair is a participatory sport: a grassroots response to evolving global crises. It is the inverse of apathy and an antidote to despair. Too often, activism is framed around being ‘against’ something. This keeps us stuck in reaction mode instead of reaching creatively toward solutions.” But regenerative work, which she frames as an act of love—not of guilt or anger or shame—is “creative and often surprising. Unlike the genius-in-the-garage narrative of technological breakthroughs, it entails an understanding of place and respect for community.”
So that’s the garden where we can start, and that’s what takes us to the Loess Plateau, in China.
Schwartz tells the story of the restoration of the Loess Plateau Watershed Rehabilitation Project, captured in a stunning documentary by journalist and filmmaker John Liu. The Loess Plateau is situated in North Central China, and was the place where Chinese agriculture began, 10,000 or so years ago. At the time, the area was known (and named) for its “powdery, windblown mineral-rich ‘loess’ soil.” But this very fertile soil is also highly prone to erosion if it is not protected by organic matter and plant cover. With the advent of agriculture, the land was cleared for farming and for communities to settle, which led to, annually, “one and a half billion tons of soil and sediment … flowing into the the Yellow River, causing untold damage.”
“The inescapable result,” Schwartz writes, was the same as so many other situations around the globe. An ongoing cycle of “flooding, drought, mudslides and famine.” She notes that the local residents did what they could to keep their livestock and their families alive, which of course just made a horrific situation even worse as they depleted whatever vegetation was left to try to “eke out one more harvest.” She reflects on Liu’s documentary, noting that “you can see weary farmers push near-empty wagons of dried out boughs across the dirt and jaunty-horned white goats clambering down a barren slope.”
The global entities involved in the rehabilitation project were determined to somehow restore the land. The situation had gone on long enough that even the locals had forgotten what made the land this way, saying that ‘It’s always been like this. … Trees don’t grow here. It’s too dry.'”
And then, one day, they found their answer. “One day in a small village, a young woman showed them some walnut trees. The visiting group thought this was great: a benefit to people and the environment. Then they looked down into the ravine and saw it was bursting with green.”
This was a community that had made a decision. When they first planted the seedlings, the livestock ate them. So, “they had a village meeting and decided they couldn’t have both.” They couldn’t let the sheep and goats feed on the greenery, if they hoped to grow anything at all. The village decided to sell their sheep and goats for the sake of regenerating plant growth.
The researchers learned an important lesson: Rather than focusing on what was going wrong, they learned to “Look at the positive outliers and learn from what they are doing.” This successful outlier became a model for the rest of the region. The team began to work with the villages on plans to manage livestock and also began to use pen feeding models so the sheep and goats would not free graze. They also looked at different breeds of animals that would be better suited for the environment and the needs of the land. And, they paid the villagers not to put their livestock on the slopes to feed. There was a recognition that the villagers were grazing the animals where they were because they had to survive. By compensating them to stop doing so, they provided the resources they needed to be able to feed their animals through other means. In just three years, they saw significant results of re-greening in many areas, simply by keeping the animals out of the reforesting areas.
The researcher, Juergen Voegele, observed that “One of the most important things is that everybody had underestimated the ability of an ecosystem to restore itself. That is a phenomenal lesson.”
Building on their success, the project was expanded and the team began to implement water management techniques as well as reforestation, agroforestry and revegetation measures. And they specifically designated some portions of the land as “ecological” or conserved, and others as “economic” or cultivated. They didn’t ignore the need to cultivate the land. But neither did they release all of it for that purpose, sending it back down the path of its earlier devastation. Liu noted that this “was based on an understanding that the ecological function was vastly more valuable than the production in the marginal lands.”
In the end, the land was regenerated, and 2.5 million people were lifted out of poverty. The villagers are growing fruit in orchards, and producing vegetables in greenhouses that they are able to sell in the local markets. The people are healthy, children are attending school, and incomes have doubled, in some cases more. And the cost? Around $500 million. Across the full swatch of land, and a ten year project, the cost was about $7 per acre to bring this area back from devastation in a way that is sustainable.
Schwartz writes that, “of course, the effort was human-supported. But it was nature that actually did it.” The land proved it still had the will to live. An ecosystem was regenerated. And maybe it’s something we have a way to talk about.
Explore more human-supported climate ideas
Photo by Ken Xu, Creative Commons via Flickr. Post by Will Willingham.
Winter Book Club
We invite you to join us, and the reindeer, for this challenging exploration of possibility as the first of our winter book club selections. Our reading schedule is below:
February 3: Ch. 1-3
February 10: Ch. 4-5
February 17: Ch. 6-7
Buy The Reindeer Chronicles by Judith D. Schwartz
- Earth Song Poem Featured on The Slowdown!—Birds in Home Depot - February 7, 2023
- The Rapping in the Attic—Happy Holidays Fun Video! - December 21, 2022
- Video: Earth Song: A Nature Poems Experience—Enchanting! - December 6, 2022
L.L. Barkat says
I was just reading a climate piece this morning, and this quote stood out to me:
“It’s weird to think of silence as messaging, but sometimes what you don’t say is as important as what you do.”
Thank you, whether it’s your wheelhouse or not, for helping Tweetspeak… speak. About what we hold dear. About this world, which is what holds us. For the poet and writer, it’s always about being held and holding—then turning this into words that change the heart, the mind, the soul, the status quo.
I loved the story of the Loess Plateau. Granted, it’s a larger scale project that took some big vision. But it inspires.
Small scale: I am rewilding my own land. All less than .25 of an acre of it. Simply letting the front hedges grow up tall has already altered the heat quotient on my lot (it blocks the late-day heat from the street). Micro-climate change. Easy to accomplish. Lovely to behold. (The birds have returned. Today they are cavorting in the snow-covered hedge-trees, waving in the lightly snowy breeze.)
Bethany R. says
“The birds have returned.”
Love it, L.L.
Will Willingham says
So remarkable to me the noticeable impacts you’ve seen from this “work” you are doing with letting your yard be who it wants to be.
Bethany Rohde says
Look to the positive outlier—
Will Willingham says
I loved that idea. And it fits so many parts of life. Instead of only trying to figure out what is going wrong, noticing what is going right is so valuable.
Megan Willome says
In “Death Comes for the Archbishop,” set in New Mexico in the late 1800s, the archbishop does exactly this, plants a little oasis of fruit trees around his adobe. It’s partly for his own gardening pleasure, and partly to get fruit into the hands of the people.
Will Willingham says
I love that. Small things, small spaces. But they accomplish a good deal.
laura says
“Even so, these small actions feel like a bare minimum, most days not even much of an inconvenience and a very far cry from what seems to be the requisite sacrifice needed to begin to solve for a looming crisis. And they also feel like they accomplish very little, on the scale of one person, one trash receptacle, one small gasoline-powered car.”
I’ve been here too–tongue-tied, feeling like my small contributions don’t amount to a hill of beans. But I like thinking in terms of regeneration. It reminds me of the land behind our property. When we moved here 24 years ago, it was a pristine two acre meadow with several apple and pear trees, one chestnut. The elderly couple who owned it used to spend days mowing it with their riding lawnmower. But when Mr. Casto passed away and Mrs. Casto moved to a residential facility, the property was sold for commercial purposes that never happened. It’s been left to go wild for maybe 15 years now. Once, some renters tried to put goats on it, but it didn’t work out. My next door neighbor thinks its an eyesore, and the weeds are bothersome sometimes. But the birds! I’ve seen more varieties of birds in the past few years than I knew existed. They love the tangled forest and underbrush. Deer and other wild animals frequent the place, I’m sure enjoying fallen apples and pears that have disappeared to our eyes. It’s nothing I have done, but I have witnessed the wildlife return and it is so lovely.
I’m looking forward to following your discussion.
Will Willingham says
It’s so interesting. On the Loess Plateau, they decimated the land just trying to get enough from it to live. We do so much to the land for reasons that have nothing to do with survival. That field behind your place sounds wonderful with all the wildlife. One can be sure it’s having positive effects that aren’t readily seen.
Sandra Heska King says
These kinds of books are hard for me to read, and it takes me longer. 😉
My heart kind of broke for the Bedouins in Saudi where the rules of Himma were essentially abolished, and folks truck in their livestock to eat everything and then leave until it rains again. So the residents have to cut trees for money to import food for their animals and end up on welfare. And yet there’s hope for recovery.
***
“All the world’s problems can be solved in a garden.”
We have our own little mini-thing happening here. We wanted to attract butterflies when we had our front landscaping redone. So our guy planted some butterfly attracting flowers–along with three little milkweed plants. The Monarchs like them, he said. Silly me. I thought they sipped the nectar. But no. They lay like 4 million eggs that turn into caterpillars that chew the plants down to stubs. On this last cycle I’d taken to “culling” the caterpillars so at least some would survive. Especially since we finally had flowers on them again. Then I broke my ankle and didn’t get outside as much and recently discovered them chewed to smithereens. I counted 16 fat caterpillars on the smallest plant one day and the next day there were half a dozen dead ones on the ground. Starved to death, I suppose. It’s clear we need a different or more expansive strategy. But now I’m heading out to prune them down and maybe even cover them them with some netting for a bit until they can come back to be eaten again. #SaveTheMonarchs
Will Willingham says
Your caterpillar story is a like a little micro glimpse into what can be an effective strategy for ensuring that some make it through. (You might find the next discussion interesting, as we’re talking about the efforts to cull the reindeer herds and why, in that case, the artificial “population control” may not be the best route.)