California is having a second major heat wave, and a fire has already broken out. This is terrible.
I have written during the first record setting flock of firestorms in California and the West in August that over a century of mismanaging forests by refusing to do adequate controlled burns has built up an astonishing and tragic excess fuel in California's forests, the results of which are too evident today as climate change assaults California with deadly heat waves.
Now I am thinking there is another and perhaps even more serious problem - the huge agribusiness methods of farming. I highly recommend a new documentary movie - "Kiss the Ground" on Netflix that teaches about this.
The issue is that the soil has been tilled, broken, for millennia in order to plant crops. This releases enormous amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere, which causes Climate Change. The soil, which in nature is rich and alive and holds the carbon that plants put into it through their roots, releases the carbon and becomes dried out and dead. So, since the soil becomes dead agribusiness has to soak crops in artificial fertilizers, pesticides and herbicides, furthering the destruction and death of the soil, which continues to release CO2 into the atmosphere which continues to cause Climate Change. This process is called desertification.
The movie is actually quite hopeful in that it proposes an easy (hard politically because of the agribusiness dollars with vested interest in the status quo) solution. Change from killing the soil to keeping the soil alive - regenerative farming. One of the main spokesmen in the movie called himself a Regenerative Rancher.
Currently, most of the farming is to grow grain to feed cattle, which are fed in feed lots. So the feed lots are deserts, the crop lands become deserts, carbon is released from the earth into the atmosphere and desertification and Climate Change are the results.
Regenerative ranching raises cattle on natural land that is planted with a variety of crops and vegetation. The result is grass fed cattle, land with actual live soil rather than dead dirt, and CO2 is pulled down into the vegetation and put back into the live soil.
So, this is actually a system that will reduce the CO2 in the atmosphere. We are trying to find ways to put less CO2 into the atmosphere by reducing coal plants and gas mileage on vehicles, and good for us. But that approach leaves the CO2 in the atmosphere for centuries. Regenerative agriculture pulls that CO2 out and reduces it.
Time for the earth to come back into balance. Regenerative Agriculture can be a big part of that. I am hopeful.
