Nature stings, bites and scratches

someone's fluffy bunny ate my lettuces.

Scientific studies and newspaper articles that reveal the benefits of spending time in ‘nature’ can often seem somewhat unreal to someone who ‘works the land’ to produce food, firewood etc. More often than not they portray an image of nature which just seems a long way from reality. Nature is portrayed as some sort of wonderland that heals all hurts and mends all wounds, a vision that probably isn’t shared by land workers! It’s not really a problem except when people leave the city and their careers to go ‘back to the land’. The difference between a romantic image of nature as seen in paintings by Constable and the reality these people discover can come as a shock.

In a town or city there are seasonal changes but the buildings stay the same, they don’t shed their leaves as trees do in many climatic areas. The countryside changes completely in the fall and again in the spring. Change is indeed a pretty constant feature of living and working in the countryside and not just seasonal. I’ve worked with people setting themselves up in their new lives and part of any design is the maintenance plan. I’ve revisited some of these projects to discover that the places had almost disappeared behind and sometimes under vegetation. When I discussed this with the people they told me that they hadn’t really noticed the vegetation creep and were now overwhelmed, they also explained that they felt that cutting vegetation down would leave everything bare and that they hadn’t appreciated how quickly stuff grows back.

Change happens all the time, three years ago here we had an over abundance of voles, the year before it was boar who caused some upsets, very late season hail storms, wildfires, floods. We just got 320mm of rain dumped on us in 24 hours, that’s about a quarter of what we’d normally expect over a year. The river has changed it’s bed and now follows a new meander, one which brings it too close to the buildings.

A Permaculture principle is to try an work with nature and not against, by which is meant work with natural processes and not against them.

A commonly used example is if you live in an area where forest is the normal ecological climax then your system should be a form of agroforestry. At a small scale maybe a forest garden at a bigger scale then agroforestry alley cropping. But climatic forcing and the rapid changes we are seeing, and will see more of, are making it a struggle to decide which tree species to plant. Falling aquifers, changes in rainfall and the rest mean that is some area where I work we have to try and predict how things will be in 30 years or more when deciding which tree types. Working with nature also means taking into account the forcing that is happening and trying to read an as yet unwritten script, natural systems evolve and, when stressed by changes to different factors, can change rapidly. Which way will they head?

This brings up the point that if one wants to ‘work with nature’ then one has to fully understand that ‘nature’ isn’t fixed like a painting, it’s continually evolving and adapting. The Robisco enzyme fuels all life on Earth and for a long time it was thought to be stuck in a genetic rut and had stopped evolving, new research has shown that it is evolving, just very very slowly. In general many organisms are evolving quicker than we might think, this is a good thing as climatic forcing, ecosystem destruction and pollution are stressing our biosphere and causing rapid change.

For many good reasons the agricultural world is relatively conservative, why change what has worked well over generations? In today’s world this strategy is causing problems as farmers keep trying to grow the same crops using the same system in a context that has changed. Water scarcity, heat waves, droughts, floods and all the rest are stressing the current agricultural paradigm and failing to adapt to this is causing problems for food producers. In many ways this was a foreseeable situation and was in fact foreseen by quite a few people. Modern industrial agriculture works in the opposite direction to nature’s arrow which points in the direction of increasing system complexity, we turn forests into prairies of wheat or corn, and use considerable quantities of energy to do this, the field ‘wants to become’ a forest so we have to plough and spray to prevent this happening. At a market garden scale it’s the same as people use smaller machines or spades to the same effect. Transforming complex systems into simple and fragile ones needs a lot of effort, time and energy, the natural processes want to go the opposite way.

Destroying the initial complexity and maintaining a simple system also leads us into traps of our own making. In Europe, farmers apply roughly 4 kilograms of phosphorus for each kilogram that we consume in food. An enormous amount of this fertiliser either runs off the land and causes problems or is ‘mineralised’ by edaphic processes and becomes less available to plants, some estimates put phosphorous wastage at around 70% of the amount applied. Arbuscular Mycorrhizal Fungi can metabolize the ‘fixed’ phosphorous and make it available to plants. The plough, the rotavator and the spade keep fields open but turning the soil destroys the fungi which means the plants no longer benefit from that symbiosis, which means adding more phosphorous which is expensive and global stocks are running low. One way or another something going to have to change.

Living in harmony with nature is another thing that we hear people telling us that we should do. A friend, finding himself incapable of living in harmony with some perfectly natural salmonella bacteria, recently spent 2 days cursing and reading magazines in his WC. When I got back to my vardo I found it to be full of firebugs and western conifer seed bugs, these latter eject a strong smelling fluid when stressed. I found it difficult to share my vardo with such a large population of these two amazing natural bugs. Mia culpa. All that to bring me back to the title, nature isn’t some cuddly, soft, snugly whatsisname. Neither is ‘nature’ separate from us, believing this is like believing that your hair is detached from you and just comes along for the ride. One of the things that really brings this into perspective are the bacteria, viruses and fungi that we all host in our bodies, when in balance they help us survive, when we knock them out of balance we can bring on a healing crisis.

Working with natural processes means recognising that we are a part of them and them of us, we live, not surrounded by the biosphere but a part of it. The best way to work with ‘nature’ is to find again our own human nature which is basically one of cooperation, compassion and mutual aid. It also means understanding how balance is a dynamic process, we can create food production systems, housing and industrial processes but they must mimic the way that natural processes flow. The waste from one species becomes a resource for others, nothing is wasted, everything is cycled and recycled again and again. Lifeforms are linked together by these flows, without them life as we know it couldn’t continue. These flows evolve and change as the lifeforms adapt and evolve.

It’s a huge dance that we decided at some point to stand aside from, well that doesn’t work and has only continued up until now because we have exploited one energy source after another. Today we see the consequences of this, fortunately we know how to sort things out, unfortunately we tend to elect leaders who are too short sighted to act in the urgent and radical way that is needed to put these solutions into place. Maybe then we can each one of us get on with the job back home.