The Hottest Year Ever

We all know the planet's heating. For decades our approach to this crisis has been to think about making others stop doing the things that make it warmer. Now that makes perfect sense. If you're hot, you can stop being hot by not doing the things that make you hot. However, that's only half the story. It's the other half of the story that I want to talk about.
 
You can stop getting hotter. Yay. But you can also work to become cooler. They're very different things. The stopping hot is really an action we humans can do, but only the planet has become a master in cooling over millennia. She has worked, James Lovelock was awed by this fact, to  keep the temperature on this planet in a rather narrow range for 65 million years. I mean, she has developed a certain amount of skill and savvy around that. All the plants, all the life forms have kind of figured out a rhythm that made it work, that rhythm kept things going within some ups and downs, but within a fairly narrow range of temperature, consistently over the eons. We stepped in and started heating things up. That's what's tipped the bucket over.
 
Until we get smart and stop heating things up, those of us who care and have the eyes to see and ears to hear can begin to work on the other end of the equation, cooling the earth. Now, we can't actually cool the earth. That's not something humans can do, not in the same way we can heat it. However, we can work with nature to help her do the job she already knows how to do. She knows how to keep the earth cool.
 
The Earth has a wonderful, beautiful, brilliant system of how that happens. Anasstasia Makarieva has been the stellar proponent of helping us understand how water moves around the planet in a way that manages temperature. It's called the biotic pump. It is a beautiful and brilliant mechanism. It is life chasing life.
 
Since we're so worried about heat, we need to pay attention so that we're creating the conditions that support life. That's the Prime Directive. We do that by helping water stay in the soil. It's simple and prosaic but so critical, at this point in time. If every one of us, in our own little way, started to ensure that whatever rain did fall, soaked into the ground and didn't run off into the sewer, or even to a nearby river, but stayed in the soil, stayed in the ground, our Earth would be a much cooler place. We can do that as individuals, get your neighbor to do it and we begin to scale, that's what we can do to help cool the planet.
 
There are lots of techniques for gardens, swales, dry creek beds, and wetlands. Think about your house, your house collects a lot of water when it rains. Where does it go? A 2,000 square foot roof will collect 22,000 gallons of water at a rather dry 17” of rain a year. Your job now is to think about where it should go and direct it to those places. Direct it to the trees around you, direct it to swales, to depressions, to places where it can sit and stay long enough to soak into the ground.
 
In order to make the ground receptive, it must be alive. Zach Bush MD said that there is, in a tablespoon of earth, more life than all the people on the planet. Now think about that. All that life needs water. All life on the planet needs water. All life on the planet needs water. All those billions and trillions of microbes and ants and paramecium and nematodes and moles and everything that's in the dirt needs water. Water is what their bodies are made of. That's where all that water goes. It goes to give life to all those things in the earth. When that happens... we have a cooler planet.
 
Where there's life, it's cooler than where there's not life. Dead earth, dry earth, stone, concrete, asphalt, all give heat back. When they absorb the heat from the sun, they reflect back eight times the heat they received. That's one of the sources the increased heat is coming from. When there's life in the soil, it's cool. The water can flow, the water can stay and the rain will fall gently and often only in cool green places.
 
It falls occasionally and hard, ferociously actually, in hot places or when it just can't stay in the air anymore. At a certain weight that water just must come down. When it’s in that state it's ferocious and horrible. Then we have flooding, we get more water than the hard, dry, ground can hold and there’s no place for it to go. That rush to the sea is wasted water.
 
Right now we're in that delicate balance, that state where this is fluctuating cycle is becoming normal. As things get hotter, it will be harder and harder to keep the soil green and alive. That means we need to actively practice soil health – at scale, now. We need to create places that the water can stay when it falls, long enough for it to soak into the ground. This approach has two prongs, creating space for the water to stay after it slows so it can sink. Things like dry creek beds and other forms of water containment along with directive processes so that when it falls, it discovers a good place to be. The second prong is that you also need to have live soil for it to fall on. If you collect water in cement or even barrels, it's not going to help the soil. Water needs to be held in vital living soil.
 
Plants with long roots, trees and perennials help open the soil to hold more air and water. They push the water down so it doesn’t evaporate but creates underground streams and refills the aquifer. So no pesticides. Stop killing things. We really, really, really need life. We don't need death. We need life. Stop killing things. Get rid of all the pesticides and chemicals that trick plants into forgetting how to help each other.
 
Begin to understand that everything is an ecosystem. That grass that you love is kind of like a desert. It doesn't give back much to the ecosystem. There are no bees that like grass. There's no flowers to feed pollinators on grass. Grass has very, very short roots, so it can't penetrate the soil and help the water go down. Plant perennials, even the things we call weeds, some of which are absolutely beautiful, they have the flowers that feed bees, insects and birds, and they have the colors we like. Make your lawn a meadow.
 
Become aware of how you are part of the ecosystem. You become part of the ecosystem if you're feeding things and making water available. Everything needs food. Everything needs water. Your job is to think about how to create an environment around yourself that is feeding other things. The pollinators, the bees, yeah, all those bugs we hate are a vital part of the whole ecosystem. We kind of know this. Rachel Carson in her book Silent Spring made so clear the interconnection of all of poison and bird loss. We have forgotten that over time. We're losing birds, we're losing insects, because we are taking away their habitat. The heat simply increases that loss as it becomes too hot for some creatures to live.
 
We have a lot of work to do to begin to do our part in helping to cool the earth. Check out our website, LivingGroundCollaborative.org for techniques and resources to help you move back into relationship with the Earth.