Giving the World a Reboot
Sustainable or Regenerative? What's the Difference?
You may have already noticed I prefer to use the word regenerative over its more popular classmate in eco-lingo, sustainable. Why? Well, sustainable literally means that which can be sustained. It assumes that the path we're on is worth sustaining.
There's a saying, keep going and you'll get where you're headed. If your computer has a lot of bugs and you keep using it, eventually the day comes when you cross your fingers, hope you've backed up all your files, and hit reboot. To keep going is sustainable. To reboot and start fresh — that's regenerative.
Look around you and at the problems facing societies today. Our soil is becoming less fertile, our water more contaminated, our air unbreathable, our forests deserts, our cities unmanageable, and our species is experiencing a pandemic that isn't in the least surprising. A brief glimpse at history shows us that widespread disease nearly always follows periods of rapid population growth that exceeds carrying capacity — and often coincides with climate change.
Civilizations fail for many reasons, but deforestation, damaging agricultural methods, short-sighted governments, and climate change are all contributing factors leading to increases in famine, disease, strife, and eventual collapse. Clearly this road doesn't end well. We need to reboot.
Well, that sure sounds depressing. Is there any hope at all?
Yes, absolutely there is hope. But we need to take action, now. We need to reclaim our food, our sustenance, as an inalienable and sovereign right. It starts small. It all starts with a garden.
All of This has Happened Before
We’ve all heard the adage, Those who cannot learn from the past are doomed to repeat it. Well, instead of focusing on the doom part, I prefer to view an examination of the past as an opportunity to take positive, informed action. People have done it before, and we can do it again.
Living where I do in the subtropical wet forest, I’m inclined to pay homage to the fascinating history of regenerative agriculture as it happened here. But Amazonia was by no means the only place in the world where people exhibited intelligence, adaptation, and resilience in how they grew food.
From central Mexico to the American Southwest, indigenous groups cultivated small, highly productive gardens in raised beds of soil called milpas. By growing a diverse mix of nutritious plants constituting complete proteins, most famously the three sister crops of maize, beans, and squash, they kept themselves and the soil healthy for centuries. Many milpas are still actively farmed today without any external inputs or fertilizers.
In southern Italy and the Mediterranean, villagers practiced what is known as “two-story” farming — but it was really on multiple levels. Instead of clearing forest to grow big fields of grain (which had proved fatal in other parts of Europe), these clever people selected nut and fruit bearing trees, chestnuts in particular. In the understory, they raised pigs, who easily grew fat on chestnut mast. Small areas with raised beds, similar to milpas, were quartered off from the pigs to grow herbs and vegetables. The chestnuts provided food for the pigs, the pigs provided both meat for people and manure for the vegetable gardens, which in turn also fed the people.
Even in more recent American history, there are regenerative farming practices worth noting. While the Pilgrims were indeed pretty clueless, hardier pioneers brought over some good ideas from Europe, namely diversifying through crop rotation and using green cover crops to replenish and nourish soil. These pioneers, not as intent on religion or conversion of the “heathen” tribes, admired and learned from the Native Americans about the vast array of edible and medicinal plants in their new home.
Feeling a little more hopeful? Good. Because now I’m going to tell you a story from the past that is going to sound eerily familiar. But this is a story from which we can extract a very empowering lesson. Really, it is our choice.
Little Ice Age to Global Warming
There is no longer any doubt that humans are contributing to the alarming rate of global warming we are experiencing today. But our planet is part of a much larger system and throughout time has undergone many periods of climatic change, some that wiped out entire species.
In the 1300s, the earth underwent one of these periodic bouts of climate change historians call “The Little Ice Age.” Although the weather got colder instead of warmer, the effects of the Little Ice Age were remarkably similar to what is happening to us, socially, politically, and environmentally today. It’s worth a look.
So what happened? Well, in the three hundred years leading up to the Little Ice Age, things in most of Europe were going along fairly well, or so it seemed. A tightly controlled feudal system which concentrated wealth and power into the hands of a few lords and barons had at least resulted in some degree of stability and security. The vast majority of the people were employed by these barons and lived at a subsistence level engaging in the main labor of the day — farming wheat. Most people didn’t live very long and nutritional deficiencies abounded on a mono diet of wheat mash, bread, and beer, but they lived long enough to reproduce. The settled population grew and grew. The seemingly orderly system was poised on a very precarious edge.
In 1315, this rigidly monopolized society reached the tipping point. It started to rain, cold relentless rain. It rained more or less continuously for five years. The wheat fields flooded and people suddenly had nothing to eat. Living in congested settlements, with their health undermined by malnutrition, people were sitting ducks for disease. Disease arrived promptly in the form of the plague we know as The Black Death. The first onslaught hit in 1348 and swept across Europe every decade for the next hundred years. Over a third of the population perished.
The destabilized society was now ripe for all sorts of calamity. Petty tyrants seized control. Marauding raiders prowled the countryside, looting whatever they could from the terrorized population. Throngs of climate refugees, running from disease and desperate, migrated across dangerous borders. Tribalism became the order of the day as frightened and displaced people clung to “their own.” Civil strife turned into full-blown war.
The artists of the day created an entire motif from the desolation of the collapse — the danse macabre, the Dance of the Dead.
Do I really need to ask at this point: Hello! Does any of this sound familiar? Our current population isn’t just growing, it’s exploding. Meanwhile, wage earners put in seventy hours weeks in order not to lose jobs with even meager "benefits." The vast bulk of our food supply is concentrated into a few highly engineered nutritionally incomplete crops — wheat, corn, and soy. Nationalism and ethnic conflict are on the rise, with civil wars making refugees out of millions of people. And now, of course, there is the coronavirus.
In this dismal tale of the Little Ice Age, there is actually a great deal to give us hope. Because after about one hundred and fifty years of grim times, people began to turn the story around. People began to show intelligence and resilience. They survived, and even began to thrive, because they adapted.
Beginning in a few countries, namely Holland, England, and Germany, people began to grow food very differently from the monoculture wheat farms that failed. They diversified into more nutritious root and vegetable crops, and planted them in small, intensive self-sustaining gardens. An orchard became an integral part of every household garden, even if it was only a stand of a few fruit trees. In England, clever farmers planted fruiting trees and shrubs as natural windbreaks called hedgerows still in use today.
Not only were these new permaculture-style gardens more productive of nutritious foods, they were also hidden from the view of armies looking for fields to burn. It was a common battle tactic of the times to starve out the enemy by destroying their crops. But the small intensive gardens now feeing much of the population were much less visible, and the people less vulnerable as a result.
Winter Landscape with Skaters, Hendrick Avercamp c.1608.
By the early 1600’s, although it was still bitterly cold across most of Europe much of the year, enterprising folk had learned how to grow a diversity of foodstuffs in the time available. In the painting Winter Landscape with Skaters (Hendrick Avercamp c.1608), although the canal is frozen and the people bundled up against the cold, the artist depicts something of a party atmosphere with busy, active people playing sports, conducting business, and skating in pairs on the ice.
With their bellies satisfied, people could turn to making their lives more comfortable. Cottage industries developed and flourished. People devised new preservation methods of the food they grew to last through the winters. Every home became a mini factory producing most of the family’s needs. What needs weren’t met inside the home could be traded for as craft markets and fairs sprung up throughout the countryside.
Nature Adapts. So Can We.
Things got better. Old routes not used since the days of the Roman Empire thronged with busy people trading their wares. Gradually, as the innovative new agricultural methods became the norm, they ushered in something of a golden age in food production for European civilization, as worthy of study as the forest gardens of Amazonia and the milpas of the Mexican plateaus. The abundance, even the beginnings of opulence are evident in art during this era, such as in the 17th-century Dutch painting of a table spread with exotic and obviously imported goods.
This incipient opulence, for those who know Western history, progressed rapidly into the Ages of Enlightenment, Rationalism and Imperialism, the very harbingers of where we are now. But for brief, shining moments in time, humanity has gotten its act together and existed in a way that just might have kept working had we remembered the error of past ways and not doomed ourselves to repeating them.
A Richly Laid Table with Parrots, Jan Davidszoon de Heem c.1605.
Anyone can learn from mistakes and become a better steward of the earth. Anyone can learn how to grow food. We are facing most, if not all, the same problems, our species has faced in the past. There are signs, small signs we are taking the first steps onto a more regenerative path. This past year, quarantined and anxious people turned to gardening to relieve stress and grow food. There are positive trends that we’re moving away from fast food and takeout meals as more people stay home to cook. Even the term regenerative agriculture is gaining popularity as people look for solutions beyond “sustainable” But given the severity of the unfolding crisis worldwide, is it enough? Do we really need a century and a half of suffering before we figure it out?
There’s an old song that goes
Yes there are two paths you can go by / But in the long run /
There’s still time to change the road you’re on
Right now, right NOW, there’s two paths we can go by: one is a stairway to heaven on earth, the other a downward spiral to a living hell. All of this has happened before. What will we do this time around? Will we learn? And how long will the lesson last?
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At Sueño de Vida we work in a meaningful way to heal land ravaged by deforestation. How meaningful? According to a recent UN Foresight Brief on climate change,
--It is of the utmost importance to stop deforestation and to increase reforestation efforts around the world. Agricultural practices should focus on soil building and the use of agroforestry methods.
That is exactly what we do here at SdV. You can help by helping us do what we do every day: plant forests that nurture soil, people, and local community.
Click HERE to donate directly to our reforestation fund OR make a monthly pledge on our Patreon.
Kristen Krash is the co-founder and director of Sueño de Vida, a regenerative cacao farm and reforestation mission in Ecuador. Sueño de Vida works to educate and inspire everyday people about permaculture, sustainable living, environmental activism, and healthy living all in the name of living more in harmony with nature.
Thank you.