The extensive root systems of perennial grasses spell out
the particles per million of carbon that Earth can sustain.
On the Big Barn at The Land Institute’s annual Prairie Festival
in Salina, Kansas, last weekend. We are already at 390. See 350.org.
These are some of the things we heard at The Land Institute’s Prairie Festival last weekend:
George Woodwell, senior scientist, Woods Hole Research Center, Falmouth, MA., calls the situation we have created on Earth, “climatic disruption” because it’s “far more than warming.” “The living systems of the Earth – the seas, forests, terrestrials; they run the world…We think the biological world is open to easy compromise. It’s not any more open to easy compromise than the law of gravity is open to easy compromise.” The metaphor he uses is the “Haitian abyss,” describing situations in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina and the situation in Haiti. At this point, neither can simply pull themselves up by their bootstraps and solve their own problems.
It takes a new view of the world to envision a world that will work, he says. We are adding 5 billion tons of carbon to the planet each year above what the sea and plants can absorb. “We can’t just tinker with the old world. We have to have a new world” or we will enter the “Haitian abyss – when we can’t get ourselves out of the situation we’re in.” “We have to move away from fossil fuel. It’s done. We have to decide what else to do. We have to preserve the integrity of the Earth.”
John Todd, ecological designer, founder of Ocean Arks, Intl., and Todd Ecological, Inc.; winner of the Buckminster Fuller Challenge for his entry “Design for a Carbon Neutral World: The Challenge of Appalachia,” in which he envisions and works toward healing and recovery of horrific mountain removal. In our efforts to solve the ecological problems we have created, he says, we can “learn the language of nature. The prairie knows something I need to know: nature’s operating instructions. I need to learn what it knows that I can apply to my life. It is a lifetime learning.” As one example in his work, Todd tells the stories of using nature’s operating instructions to clean water from toxic waste.
Wes Jackson, founder of The Land Institute, tells the compelling story of the collapse of the industrial mind and compels us to face and deal with the ecological problems we have created by learning and respecting dynamic ecological systems to “increase our resilience thinking while we still have a little slack.” “Enhance your ability to absorb disturbance.” And he asks: “Do we have the ability to practice restraint?”
It was a deeply meaningful symposium.
Here are people who are giving us the worst possible news.
And showing us ways to create a new world.
It is hopeful, in a we-HAVE-to-get-down-to-business way.
Suddenly,
all the little things we do
seem inadequate.
We must do all that -
and more,
not only individually,
but corporately,
as a species,
changing our ways radically,
living within the natural systems
of which we are not independent,
but of which we are a part.
It is inspiring and deeply helpful
to meet people who can and are leading the way.
Now,
can we listen
and take their lead?
