Yes, Houston, we have a problem: Our oceans are dying.
As the brilliant futurist Buckminster Fuller used to point out, our Spaceship Earth is hurtling through space at a great speed.
Imagine if someone told you (a passenger on that ship) that the main oxygen systems were failing because of how food was being grown.
What would you do upon receiving that dire warning? Perhaps work to make a change? Lobby the ship's captain? Maybe you'd simply deny that there was any such connection and keep going about your busy life.
But an imminent loss of oxygen just happens to be a current fact, because the ocean's phytoplankton (which provides two-thirds of the planet's oxygen) is rapidly dying off. Industrial agriculture not only contaminates our oceans with pesticide and nitrogen-fertilizer runoff, leading to massive dead zones; it is stripping our soils of carbon, which ends up in the oceans and creates acidification. At the current trajectory, in just a few decades there won't be much left alive in our oceans as the phytoplankton dies—all because of how we grow our food.
When climate change is discussed, the media, our governments and the climate movement are focused on the "evil" carbon in the atmosphere and the melting of the Arctic region. They're pleading with governments and Fortune 1000 firms to stop conducting "Drill, baby, drill" operations. Important stuff for sure, but lost in this debate of how much oceans will rise or how hot the planet will be in 2100 is a very sobering fact. If we don't immediately deal with the number one enviro issue of the day, ocean acidification, humanity will not be around in 2100 to observe rising temperatures or oceans lapping over Wall Street and Silicon Valley.
The good news is that we can cool both the planet and the seawater, while removing excess carbon from the sea, by regenerative agriculture—a solution literally under our feet!
The Regenerative Agriculture Initiative at California State University, Chico, and the Carbon Underground group have created this concise definition:
"Regenerative Agriculture describes farming and grazing practices that, among other benefits, reverse climate change by rebuilding soil organic matter and restoring degraded soil biodiversity —resulting in both carbon drawdown and improving the water cycle."
The little-known facts are that (a) industrial agriculture contributes more to climate change than Chevron, Exxon and the entire transportation industry combined and (b) regenerative agriculture can reverse climate change if we shift our society's focus from degeneration to regeneration. If we can put men on the Moon, can we shift how we grow food in way that supports life on Spaceship Earth?
Designer William McDonough recent article, Carbon is not the Enemy, in the journal Nature states:
"But carbon—the element—is not the enemy. In the right place, carbon is a resource and a tool."
Don Wilkin of the Soil and Water Conservation District in McHenry-Lake County, Illinois, outlines how to transform farming in his white paper, The New CRP: Restoring the Nation's Depleted Farmland through Carbon Farming.
Also, worth reading is Kristen Ohlson's, This Kansas farmer fought a government program to keep his farm sustainable, to see why we must change the way we incentivize farmers.
As I explained in my Nov. 18, 2015 EcoWatch article, Soils and Oceans Omitted from the Paris COP21 Agenda:
In this age of fascination with high technology, we choose to ignore the earthworm (tiller of the soil) and ocean plankton (our indispensable oxygen generator) at our peril. Did you know that two out of every three breaths you take come via phytoplankton? Relying primarily on solar, wind, and hybrids as the solutions to climate change is a path toward disaster.
The good news is that we can help heal our acidic oceans, moderate the planet's erratic weather, and produce abundant food by refocusing on soil sequestration (which, as a bonus, improves not just soil quality but also water-holding capacity) across farmlands, rangelands and forestlands.
Living in a Biological World
Paying attention to the health of our soils and oceans is now a matter of life and death. That may come as shock to most Americans, as our media and educational systems teach us many things—except how the Earth works. We can learn how to be a doctor (except that most physicians forget nutrition) or a carpenter (but they forget how forests grow) or a farmer (except that they forget the importance of soil health and earthworms) or an urban planner (but they forget how to conserve water). Our American hyper-specialization has yielded technocrats who don't understand the laws of nature.