The Missing Half of Climate Change: Why Our Planet is at 50% Capacity and How to Get it Back
The Great Simplification #222 with Brett KenCairn
The Dust Bowl of the 1930s is one of the worst ecological disasters in American history. Across the great plains, roughly 2.5 million people left the region over the decade, amid severe crop failures, livestock losses and widespread hunger. Caused by drought and extreme land degradation, this regional collapse is also an example of what is now happening in ecosystems across the globe. The glimmer of hope in this story lies in the equally remarkable recovery of the Dust Bowl region, which has continued on as one of the most productive agricultural regions in the world. What if we could name and replicate the techniques used to rehabilitate this once inhospitable landscape and use them to restore and regenerate local ecosystems across the planet?
In this episode, I’m joined by regenerative change practitioner Brett KenCairn for a conversation that reframes the dominant narrative about climate change, emphasizing that it was never just a carbon problem but also one centered on living systems degradation. Brett explains that the desolation of foundational, life-supporting ecosystems has resulted in our planet now operating at roughly half its biological productive capacity. Remarkably, this reframing also clears the way for a path forward: because most degradation is due to how humans have used the land, it means – if we act soon – altering our use of the land can also help regenerate lost capacity. Brett describes how his team and other regenerative experts are attempting to do just that by restoring biodiversity, water cycles, photosynthetic capacity, and (most importantly) opening the door to broad community participation through training, compensation, and meaningful work.
What sorts of regenerative techniques might help bolster our local ecosystems’ capacities to buffer, absorb, and cycle energy in order to support life during the extremes ahead? How could we alter our economic and social incentives to better support those doing the critical work to stabilize local ecology? And lastly, could the principles of living systems regeneration also act as an opportunity to reconnect with our place among the web of life, paving the way toward a humanity rooted in stewardship and reciprocity?
Want to dive deeper into the concepts covered in this episode? Follow along with the Show Notes & Links to Learn More, which you can find at the bottom of the page for every episode of The Great Simplification, or you can download them here.
In case you missed it…
In last week’s Frankly, I discussed my long-running attempt to understand non-duality, and why this concept has remained just out of my grasp despite years of conversations with teachers, thinkers, and podcast guests. I began with a personal reflection on the possibility that my difficulty understanding non-duality does not stem from lack of intelligence or a short attention span, but from the particular cultural operating system that Westerners seem to inherit from birth. This operating system – which appears everywhere from language to economics to institutions – reinforces separation between the subject and the object, the observer and the observed, the self and the world. It trains us to experience ourselves as isolated individuals standing apart from the living systems that sustain us.
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How timely! This is my blog post this morning "Farming In Mud" https://drjohnsblog.substack.com/p/farming-in-mud
I may have mentioned my intention to install a large new garden bed I have been preparing at our rural homestead. Yesterday we had a nice extended lunch with my Uncle Don, who is 96, and his lady-love, Dagmar, who was a little German girl in WW-2 and its aftermath.
As rains were expected in the evening, we hurried to Yoakum to get final bed prep and planting done before the garden bed became mud.
I had already roto-tilled this bed 3 times, which is fairly rough work, as roto-tillers buck up and down a lot and need the tines cleaned after each minute of use in this clay soil with deep grass roots.
When we arrived in Yoakum a little after 5 PM I thoroughly raked the bed for dry grass to throw out, and to even the low spots, intending to further roto-till 8 rows and use my brand new seeder to plant purple-hull black-eyed peas, a variety which tends to grow upright for a one-time machine harvest at about 4 months. My intention is to have Wrens Abruzzi rye in the bed the non-summer 8 months of the year, a simple 2 crop rotation which whould help build the soil.
This is a novel project for me. I don't know of anybody doing it.
Theoretically, it is feasible, but the devil is always in the details.
The roto-tiller cannot eliminate all of the deeply established grass roots, something people used to know, originating the term "grass roots", which now lacks a clear meaning.
I can foresee a lot of ongoing difficulty as I will need to keep cutting down crops with live roots and planting the next crop into the established roots, while chopping the plants down in place as mulch, to eventually integrate into the soil.
Yesterday evening, right as I finished raking, it started to rain lightly, but I still needed to run the roto-tiller down 8 rows and plant them, so I kept going, because I wanted to roto-till before the bed turned to mud. It did get superficially muddy, and my flip-flops got so much mud on the bottems that I had to go barefoot. There were no sharp things, so I could. I roto-tilled the 8 rows, spacing them across the 24 ft. of bed width in the 34 ft long bed.
I had never used the seeder before, but had spent a couple of hours reading negative reviews on various seed-planting devices, and this one was the least-bad choice without doubling or tripling the price.
The front wheel rotates, and a belt commects the wheel-pulley to a pulley that rotates a collector-plate (8 disserent sizes), which scoops a seed in each litte cutout and transfers it to a tube tat drops it into a little furrow it digs. Then a little metal spade pushes the soil closed over it, as one proceeds, pushing downward and forward.
You can see that this would not work into established grass roots, and might clog up in mud. It would also not work in hardpan soil. It did not work at first in my superficially muddy tilled-rows, so I had to adjust the belt tension with a wrench and pliars, then the seeder-wheel rotated properly. the light rain continued, and the mud progressively covered the wheels.
There was a tendency for a mud plug to collect seeds down at the bottom of the seed-dropper tube, so I removed it at the end of each row, having a mud blob with seeds in-hand, which I walked up a row to distribute, or threw pieces of. The mud was getting muddier.
I finished all of my passes with the seeder, and had to get a bunch of seed out of the bin by hand. The seeder fell over and spilled out the last seeds twice, so I walked up and down some rows seed-dropping by hand, noticing that a lot of the seeds were just on the surface, and pushing them into the mud with my feet as I proceeded. This became the final-step of the planting routine as I carefully trod each row twice, squishing visible seeds into mud with my feet until I did not see any more seeds on the surface.
I had to do a lot of cleaning up of myself and the seeder with a hose after that. I left the seeder in a covered workspace.
Our rain guage showed 1/16" of rain, but it has rained a lot in recent weeks, so the soil had ladequate moisture at the start. this morning the guage showed 3/8", indicating further and substantial rain overnight. With fresh coffee in hand I went to examine the patch. Many seeds hadbeen superficiallyrevealed by the rain, and were partly visible in the mud. We expect rains fairly often for the next week or 2, and I decided not to push them in with my feet again this morning.
We will see how the birds and critters do with this new food source...
Barefoot Agronomist
Living Systems Regeneration. What an episode to warm the heart! I have been doing this on a small scale all my adult life and I never knew it. That is, creating gardens not for may ability to control, or to grow the perfect plant, but to create communities of plants that mimmick living systems, and to sit back and what the flaur and the fauna appear, and all the happy results of living complexity to take form.
I am not exaggerating, but if we do this, if we create living systems in our own places it has the power to literally integrate us back into those living systems as humans. In a previous episode you talked about living in the present and practices to bring us back. Every time I need to do that, I just spend 5 minutes looking at the insects and the birds that now arrive to share my space. We have know for centuries that this is tonic. Not to mention working with the soil and sharing the results with neighbours etc.
To bring all this to some current activity I want to say, perhaps many do not know, but one third of all the space for birds and plants in England is people's gardens. Many people reducing or getting rid of baron lawns and creating prairie planting or cottage gardens. Giving over control of a large green pristine piece of monoculture, to sprawling, living, evolving complex spaces. I was so happy to see that this is now also taking off in US when I read this article last week; We can do better than English lawns.
https://tinyurl.com/273ts2m6
This episode has really made me think again how I might use my "space creation" skills to help others or inspire others. One project worth looking at is the Beth Chatto housing project. A housing estate (new neighbourhood project) was created next to and using some of the land of the Beth Chatto estate. Beth was a celebrated garden designer, way ahead of her time - right plant, right place. Anyway, the project was only sanctioned when the gardeners of the estate were allowed to design the open spaces in the neighbourhood. As a result they reduced the grass, replacing it with mixes of grasses, flowers, shrubs and trees that were self-supporting. New living systems. The result after a year or two of measurment. 10 times less maintenance cost, 10 times more bio-diversity and bird/insect populations, in comparison with similar projects.
Finally, I have been looking around for further evidence of what I think is a huge contribution to the future - living systems regeneration - and I think this channel and this particular story, whereby birds appeared in Iceland as part of an aforrestation program. Birds never seen on the island and so they had to invent new words in the language. That is the power of nature and how complex systems show life seeking life and creating new life.
See it here https://youtu.be/G_gqvFy-buM?si=XZqhccF30AJFFMgE
Thanks again to Nate and to Brett KenCairn for this wonderful and inspiring episode. Crucial to the future of the living world and us as an integral part of it.