Regeneration
The following are excerpts from Regeneration: Ending the Climate Crisis in One Generation (Penguin Random House, 2021), the latest New York Times best-selling book by Mill Valley resident, global citizen and internationally renowned environmental activist Paul Hawken. Hawken is a personal hero and mentor to many‚ including our publisher and editor-in-chief, Gibson Thomas. You will also read in this issue that one of his previously published books—Drawdown (Penguin Books, 2017)—was the single ray of hope that inspired Sonoma County’s Julia Jackson to join the fight to end climate change and found her Grounded.org. Regeneration tells the tough truths of where we are on the path to climate crisis, but it also offers real solutions with initiatives that include but go well beyond solar energy, electric vehicles and tree planting to include regenerative agriculture, silvopasture, food localization and “wasting nothing.”
Read on, and prepare to get your waggle on.
REGENERATION
Regeneration means putting life at the center of every action and decision. It applies to all of creation—grasslands, farms, people, forests, fish, wetlands, coastlands, and oceans—and it applies equally to family, communities, cities, schools, religions, cultures, commerce, and governments. Nature and humanity are composed of exquisitely complex networks of relationships, without which forests, lands, oceans, peoples, countries, and cultures perish.
Vital connections have been severed between human beings and nature, within nature itself, and between people, religions, governments, and commerce. This disconnection is the origin of the climate crisis, it is the very root—and it is where we discover solutions and actions that can engage all people, regardless of income, race, gender, or belief.
The only effective and timely way to reverse the climate crisis is the regeneration of life in all its manifestations, human and biological. It is also the most compelling, prosperous, and inclusive way.
This is a watershed moment in history. The heating planet is our commons. It holds us all. To address and reverse the climate crisis requires connection and reciprocity. It calls for moving out of our comfort zones to find a depth of courage we may never have known. It doesn’t mean being right in a way that makes others wrong; it means listening intently and respectfully, stitching together the broken strands that separate us from life and one another. It means neither hope nor despair; it is action that is courageous and fearless. The climate crisis is not a science problem. It is a human problem. The ultimate power to change the world does not reside in technologies. It relies on reverence, respect, and compassion—for ourselves, for all people, for all life. This is regeneration.
AGENCY
The agent who can head off the climate crisis is reading this sentence. Logically, this seems like nonsense—surely individuals are powerless to counter the global drivers and momentum of global warming. That’s a fair conclusion if we assume that yesterday’s institutions should or will do it for us. There is a debate as to whether individual behavior or government policy is the key to solving the climate crisis. There shouldn’t be. We need the involvement of every sector of society, top to bottom and everything between.
Worried that you are not an expert? Almost no one is. But we understand enough. We know how greenhouse gases function and warm the planet; we are seeing greater climate volatility and extreme weather; and we know the primary sources of carbon emissions. We want a stable climate, food security, pure water, clean air, and an enduring future that we can become ancestors to. Cultures, families, communities, lands, professions, and skills vary with every person. The situations we find ourselves in differ. Who better to know what to do at this time, in this place, with your knowledge, than you?
Regenerating human health, security and well-being, the living world, and justice is the purpose.
This requires a worldwide, collective, committed effort. Collectives do not emerge from the tops of institutions. They begin with one person and then another, the invisible social space where commitment and action join and come together to become a dyad, a group, a team, a movement. To put it simply, no one is coming to help. There is not a brain trust that is going to work out the problems while we ponder and wait. The most complex, radical climate technologies on earth are the human heart, head, and mind, not a solar panel. Just as we stand at the abyss of a climatic emergency, we stand at another remarkable threshold. The rate of understanding and awakening about climate change is increasing exponentially, even skyrocketing. Climate change is becoming experiential rather than conceptual. As weather becomes ever more disruptive, and awareness and concern increase, the movement to reverse the climate crisis will likely become the largest movement in the history of humankind. It took decades to create this moment.
It is natural to worry that it matters little if you are taking action if others are not. From the planet’s point of view, there is no difference between a climate change denier and someone who understands the problem but does nothing. The number one cause of human change is when people around us change. Research by Stanford neuroscientist Andrew Huberman upends the idea that beliefs determine what we do or what we can do. It is the opposite. Beliefs do not change our actions. Actions change our beliefs. Do you believe there is nothing you can do to make a difference? Logical. Do you fear the future? Understandable. Do you feel stressed about climate change? Sensible. However, stress is your brain telling you to act. Stress is a signal; it is urging you to do something. Not only do actions change your beliefs, your actions change other people’s beliefs.
When honeybee scouts find a bounty of blooms and nectar, they return to the hive, where they do a symbolic waggle dance at the entrance of the hive. The dance signals the precise direction and distance to the flowering plants or trees. The more vigorous the waggle, the richer the source of nectar. Once worker bees have seen the dance, they have the necessary information and fly straight to the source. It is time for humanity to create waggle dances unique to their knowledge, place, and determination. Another way to look at this time in history is this: We are being homeschooled by the planet, our teacher. This book is an attempt to reflect those teachings.
LOCALIZATION [OF FOOD]
What we eat and how it is produced has a profound impact on climate. When you drive a car, you know you are emitting greenhouse gases. In many cases, the bags of groceries in the back seat will have a greater climate impact than the car trip to and from the store. Recent studies show that 34 percent of total greenhouse gas emissions are caused by the food system. This includes production, transport, processing, packaging, storage, retail, consumption, and waste.
Localization of food is the step-by-step process of reestablishing regional growing and production of nutritious, authentic food for family, friends, and communities. People choose to localize food sources for multiple reasons: It addresses human health, childhood disease, agricultural pollution, right livelihood, social justice, soil erosion, malnutrition, urban food apartheid, and cultural and biological diversity. There may be no other single activity that encompasses a greater range of goodness for life, health, water, children, and the planet.
For most of human existence, people ate what they could hunt, gather, grow, or obtain by trade. Until the advent of railroads, agriculture remained largely local. However, as transport systems including long-haul trucking opened up distant markets, it made economic sense to grow grains— wheat, corn, barley, and rye—where they were most suited to soil and clime. With the development of refrigeration, fruits and vegetables followed suit. Food became a commodity, and lower costs trumped locale. Time-tested relationships between people and their food broke down, until they became largely vestigial. The economics of wheat, corn, soy, and vegetable oils such as canola favor large industrial farms. This was not only the beginning of Big Ag; it was also the birth of Big Food, an entirely new industrial food system that had never before existed.
Big Food is another term for mass-produced animal foods and ultraprocessed food-like concoctions made of soy, corn, fats, sugar, salt, chemicals, and starch. Also known as junk food, it makes up 60 percent of diets in the United States, and 54 percent in the UK. A more polite term is “food that does not nourish.” Inadequate nutrition and disease are inseparable. Because of the ubiquity, addictiveness, and constant promotion of industrialized food, nearly 75 percent of Americans are obese or overweight, and one-third of Americans are either prediabetic or have type 2 diabetes. Obesity often leads to heart disease, cancer, diabetes, hypertension, dementia, arthritis, and more.
In the United States, a majority of people do not have access to good food or cannot afford it if they do. The American diet consists of big brands, big bread, big beer, big beef, big bacon, big cereal, big milk, big potato, big soda, and big corn, because it is heavily advertised and seemingly inexpensive. During the pandemic of 2020, the broader industrial food system broke down. American cattle ranchers reported losses of $13 billion. Dairy farmers poured hundreds of thousands of gallons of milk down the drain. The alternative to Big Food is ubiquitous food—localization of production, instead of centralization.
The reimagination of the industrial food system is manifesting itself in surprising and brilliant ways. There is not just farm-to-table; there is also pier-to-plate. With their distributors and restaurant customers closed, fisherfolk cook their catch on the dock for consumption on the spot or to take home. Ranchers are delivering meat directly to consumers, as are fisherfolk. Farmers sell shares or subscriptions to their produce output and deliver it weekly. Instead of big farms growing one crop far from where you live, these are small farms growing many crops. In these CSAs—short for community- supported agriculture—the fruits and vegetables are often organic, ultrafresh instead of ultraprocessed, varying with the season, creating a relationship between a suburban or urban family and a specific farm family. Subscriptions provide a steady cash flow to the farmer at a higher premium than wholesaling to distributors or restaurants. With approximately ten thousand CSAs in the United States today, many are starting to add neighboring producers to their weekly deliveries, including eggs, bread, cheese, flowers, jams, and farm-fresh chickens.
Paradoxically, one community that is relocalizing its food is farmers in rural areas who grow corn and soy, primarily for beef and dairy. Most farmers who live in rural America are unable to get healthy, fresh food and produce. Seed grower and agronomist Keith Berns, who farms in Nebraska, created what he calls the Milpa Garden, a seed mix whereby farmers can create abundant supplies of fresh vegetables, beans, herbs, and fruit for their families and communities. Farmers pack their grain drill with a vegetarian grocery list of seeds: squash, beans, cabbage, broccoli, leafy greens, peas, sunflowers, cucumbers, herbs, tomatoes, radishes, okra, watermelon, cantaloupe, sweet corn, and other edibles. The seeds are cross-drilled on a one-acre plot, creating dense plantings that crowd out the weeds. The flowering species attract insects that control pests, and plant density protects soil moisture. They have been called chaos gardens, but Berns, who is a regenerative, no-till farmer, prefers the term “milpa garden.” Milpa means “cultivated field” in the classical Nahuatl language, still spoken in parts of Mexico; it’s a term Berns learned from Charles Mann’s book 1491. Berns based the milpa mix on the three-thousand-year-old Three Sisters method practiced by Mesoamerican farmers, who sowed (and still sow) corn, beans, and squash together, a polyculture methodology that spread north and was practiced by Native Americans before contact. The Milpa Garden mix is closer to twenty sisters. After several months of harvesting—which is similar to a treasure hunt for the invited 4-H members, neighbors, food banks, and townspeople scrambling and discovering in the garden—the farmer can turn the field over to grazing animals that thrive on what remains. Some farmers purchase the milpa seed mix and sell the produce through farmers’ markets, local grocers, and roadside stands. Tom Cannon, who farms in Oklahoma, is aiming to grow twenty to thirty acres per year, planted within a corn maze where people can forage, wander, and discover. The Cannons farm and live in the country, but Tom and his daughter Reagan were surprised that many of their customers no longer know how to prepare or preserve fresh food, so they are planning to provide recipes and cooking, pickling, and canning classes.
Hunger and food insecurity exist in rural America just as much as in urban America, and Keith Berns has dreams. He would like to see commodity farmers set aside 1 percent of their land for milpa gardens, which would be approximately two million acres spread across the country. It would increase U.S. vegetable production by 50 percent. Berns offers one acre of seed for free if the harvest goes to food banks, churches, homeless or women’s shelters, or people in need. Physician Daphne Miller, who writes about the connection between health, culture, and agriculture, sees a change arising in the no-till, regenerative farming community. There is a newfound sense of purpose that transcends their commodity crops—the idea that regeneration means providing direct nourishment to families, neighbors, and community, something their soybean and corn harvests could never do. For farmer Tom Cannon, it is a paradigmatic change: “For years, I was trying to grow bigger. Now the challenge is to grow smaller and more local.”
We are “really good at processing cheap food and selling uniform waxed apples at the same place we buy toilet paper,” according to Julia Niiro, founder of the company MilkRun, but we are not so good at delivering tasty, sustainable food grown on local farms. She is bringing back the milkman in order to save family farms. Traditional milkmen delivered milk, butter, and eggs to people daily in horse-drawn carts starting in 1860 in Britain, a practice that spread to countries around the world. In America, milkmen delivered 30 percent of the nation’s milk right up until the 1960s. Milk was bottled in glass that was constantly recycled, wooden cabinets were built into exterior walls for deliveries of milk and groceries, and money was left inside on an honor system. Cars, supermarkets, refrigeration, milk cartons, and suburbs killed the tradition, but Niiro thinks it is time to bring it back—only this time it will be milkwomen and men delivering nearby rural bounty. Cities and local farmers are only tenuously connected, except through farmers’ markets. MilkRun is connecting over a hundred local farmers with thousands of Portlanders. It is able to provide six to seven times what they would make selling to grocery stores. Smaller farmers need money, but they can’t raise their prices much. Creating ways to reconnect farms, farmers, cooks, schools, and people is what the new food system is about.
In California, a law passed that allows home chefs to prepare hot home-cooked meals, deliver them, have them picked up, or even offer them to the public in their dining rooms. There are now apps that connect people to providers in networks that offer more choices for eaters and more customers for cooks. People are able to stay at home and earn needed income, an economic opportunity that never existed for millions of truly gifted cooks, people who tend to emphasize recipes that are cultural treasures and family traditions. In California, famed chef Alice Waters pioneered farm-to-table in her restaurant in the 1970s, and the Edible Schoolyard Project in the 1990s. Students garden, grow, and prepare food for one another at school. Her latest project aims to localize farm-to-school programs—local organic farmers selling and delivering directly to local school cafeterias.
Localization is more than a health and climate issue; it can be delicious social justice. For Black and Brown communities, the term food desert is a white word for food apartheid, a system where people of color have no agency in their food system—a kind of urban plantation served by liquor and convenience stores that sell bread and Twinkies, with no suitable food within walking or carrying distance. The struggle for food sovereignty goes back to the beginnings of America, when Indigenous and enslaved cultures (African Americans came from a continent that contained more than three thousand distinct cultures) were uprooted and deracinated from their lands, foodways, hunting grounds, and farms.
