Ecosystemic thinking is at the heart of Permaculture

Microbial warfare and the importance of diversity.

Linear and binary thinking

This approach has leads us constantly towards over simplistic thinking. A ‘pest’ attacks a crop so we need to kill the pest. A bacteria ‘causes’ a disease so we need to kill the bacteria. The easiest way to do this is to just nuke them all. Broadspectrum antibiotics kill off everything, both pathogenic and hygenic microbes thereby completely upsetting the microbiome. In the same way broadspectrum pesticides kill the targeted so-called pest and also beneficial insects such as pollinators and natural pest predators thereby upsetting the ecosystem.

Drilling down into ecosystems.

Ecosystems change as a consequence of the changes that happen to the organisms that make them up. We have macroscale effects like ice ages and volcanic eruptions. Then more localised impacts like wildfires and flooding and on through the scale to bacteria and viruses. The impacts of these can cascade through an ecosystem and can fundamentally change it by harming a keystone species.

An example of this is the era of warmer temperatures that is known as the Medieval Warm Period and the subsequent cold period called the Little Ice Age. The reasons for the warm period are not yet known but modelling has shown that normal climatic variation can’t explain ths period nor the following cold period. It is theorised that increased solar activity, decreased volcanic activity, and changes in ocean circulation could explain the warm period. The same is similar for the Little Ice Age and orbital cycles, decreased solar activity, increased volcanic activity, altered ocean current flows are seen as possible causes.

The climatic changes of the Little Ice Age caused The Great Famine which started with bad weather in spring 1315, this was exceptionally high levels of rainfall. Heavy rainfall also characterised the following year and it was only in the summer of 1317 that the weather returned to normal patterns. By then some pathogenic microbes had struck causing mass pneumonia, bronchitis, and tuberculosis. This meant that the famine continued because so many people were ill and unable to grow food.

Then came another microbe, Yersinia pestis, which was responsible for the death of perhaps 50% of the European population. Agricultural land was abandoned and recolonised by trees until the human population and agricultural production bounced back and the land was cleared again. It could have gone the other way.

Ecosystemic thinking

‘I’ am an ecosystem made up of human bits and a multitude of other organisms. ‘I’ live in an ecosystem which is connected to other ecosystems and joined together they make up the biosphere. Interactions buzz around inside and outside and ‘I’ am permeable with organisms coming to live on or in me. They can provoke changes, sometimes, from my point of view, making my ecosystem work better or sometimes causing some rapid changes like a fever or diarrhea. Some of my companions can rub off on someone else, a six second intimate kiss can cause a bacterial transfer of some 80 million bacteria. Couples tend to have more similar oral microbiota composition when compared to unrelated individuals.

The microbial world is quite complex and involves a lot of different actors, viruses, viroids, bacteria, archeae and so on. These actors can also be classified according to what they do, for example some viruses are bacteriophages. These organisms are very abundant and to be found wherever there are either bacteria or archeae. We have a lot of these organisms in our guts and this is called the phageome. Some forms of disease bring about a reduction in size and diversity of the phageome.

I try and avoid the ‘arms race’ type analysis of these systems but important factors in the evolution of an ecosystem are the intraspecies and interspecies interactions. Some are symbiotic, some commensal, some competitive (There are of course other forms)

For example different forms of bacteria don’t always get along with each other, they compete for the same host or resource. They develop strategies to get rid of other bacteria and have the resource to themselves. They can produce bacteriocins (such as tailocins) and microcins which are toxic to similar or related bacteria. Bacteriophages are there too, infecting and destroying bacteria. This is happening in our personal microbiomes and we know today that a good diversity of bacteria, viruses, bacteriophages etc is essential to good health. The same is true with ecosystems in general, diversity tends to mean more ecosystem resiliance and enhances the capacity of such a system to recover from shocks.

Lets take this further and look at some research into Pseudomonas viridiflava. This bacteria cause soft rot in stems and flowering part of around 30 cultivated crops including kiwis, melons and tomatoes. The research showed that one variant of the bacteria will come to dominate monocultural crop fields but that this doesn’t happen on uncultivated land. The latter areas obviously have a higher ecological diversity than the crop field and this diversity extends to the microbial community.

The fact that no lineage of Pseudomonas viridiflava dominates uncultivated areas made the researchers turn towards exploring the impact of bacteriophages. Perhaps the higher diversity of these prevents a particular lineage of Pseudomonas viridiflava to become dominant? In fact what they found is even more spectacular, they discovered that bacteria can acquire, repurpose and use elements of bacteriophages, tailocins, which penetrate the outer membranes of other pathogens and kill them.

In general this research is yet another which confirms that monocultural cropping is unsustainable and creates it’s own problems. Pesticides are needed due to the low biodiversity and consequential absence of beneficial insects. Food production has to be agroecological, with the plants growing in an ecologically diverse habitat.

Yeoman’s Scale of Permanence

Kelli Boggs

The scale is pretty well described by the picture. Reshaping a landscape, for example, is harder than putting up a fence. This scale is widely used in Permaculture design. In the context of this article I would propose a similar scale but of those thing which undermine ecosystem resiliance.

From hard to deal with to easier:

1. Solar variation, Milankovich cycles, changes in ocean circulation, volcanism. There’s not a lot we can do to avoid the impact of these events. A glacial period will radically disrupt ecosystems and when they come back they will probably be different to before.

2. Climate change. This is linked to the above but also to human activities.

3. Wildfire, flooding. These are sometimes natural, wildfires started by lightning, floods caused by beaver dams. Or caused by human activities.

4. Loss of biodiversity. Sometimes natural, most frequently due to human activities.

5. Soil destruction and loss. Predominantly because of human activities.

6. Pollution. Human activities. Trace concentrations in the environment of some pharmaceuticals have led to severe population crashes in vultures throughout India and Pakistan.

7. Personal microbiome.

We can then put this into a Permaculture design context which will involve analysing flows and adjusting them so they care for the Earth and people.

Example 1: Planting trees can help reduce the impact of greenhouse gas pollution and floods, increase water availability, preserve and improve soils and increase biodiversity. Current broadscale agriculture does the opposite to this so switching to agroforestry means producing food and having the benefits of trees including climate change mitigation.

Example 2. A diet high in saturated fat can lead to high Low density lipoprotein cholesterol (LDL-C) levels and raises the risk of heart disease and strokes. To deal with high blood cholestrol 20 million people worldwide take Statins¹. As mentioned above the production, use and disposal of pharmaceuticals release considerable quantities into the environment. These have negative impacts on a wide range of organisms and undermine ecosystem stability, as an example contraceptive pill residues cause sex reversal in fish. A poor diet will also damage the persons microbiome which will lead to further health complications.

From a Permaculture perspective we don’t focus on LDL-C, we take a more holistic view. High LDL-C can be avoided by good diet and healthy lifestyle choices. Better diet means producing more good food and less high in fat, sugar and salt processed foods. Agroecological food production helps maintain biodiversity, preserves soils and eliminates the need for synthetic chemicals. The use of older crop varieties means higher levels of a range of essential micronutrients. Hyper local production means foods are eaten when ripe and, at least partly, removes the need for roads and road transport of foods. A more varied diet means a healthier microbiome which has positive effects on overall health and reduces the need for pharmaceuticals.

One could say that a healthy personal microbiome is good for the environment in general.

Everything is connected to everything else and we seek to make these interactions positive for us and the biosphere. Simplistic solutions like ‘greening’ the drug industry to try and reduce pharmaceutical contamination of ecosystems are blind alleys. We have to address causes and not symptoms, damaging ecosystems reduces the number of ecological services they can provide and many of these have positive health benefits.

Linear, binary and overly simplistic thinking has got us into this mess and this type of thinking won’t get us out of the hole. We have to take the blinkers off and start to see and think much more widely about things. We must start thinking and acting in a more ecosystemic way, as Mollison said “everything gardens or has an effect on the environment”.

1. It’s interesting to note that research indicates that the benefits of taking statins are varied and can be quite modest.