May - June 2020 Newsletter

Events:

 

• Cambridge Forum - Farming for the Future with Ronnie Cummins of the Organic Consumers Association, Michael Chuisano of Naked Farm in Marion, NY, and young, savvy farmer Addie Shreffler, Friday, June 26, 2020, 3 p.m.
  
• WGBH Forum Network - Ask the Expert - permaculturist Sven Pihl will answer your gardening questions - Friday, June 26, 2020 at Noon

 

In this issue:

 

• Our Blessed Unrest Conference Hits a Home Run
• Our Compendium Editor Publishes in The Guardian on Miyawaki Forests
• Interview with William Horvath, and the Promise of Permaculture
• Compendium Notes: "Impacts of biodiversity on the emergence and transmission of infectious diseases"

Blessed Unrest:

Growing a Future for Life on Earth 

 

Conference videos and supplementary material

now online on our Program page.

 

Here's the really good news!

 

Thousands of independent organizations and millions of individuals worldwide are restoring life on Earth, and we need you too!

 

 

Our Speakers: Ellen Bernstein, Alfred Brownell, Roland Bunch, Rachel Burger, John Burkhardt, Arielle Martinez Cohen, Iona Conner,  Cynthia Contie,Ronnie Cummins, Rev Dele, Anna Gilbert-Muhammud, Christopher Haines, Claire Hedberg, Hayat Imam, Jan Lambert, Susan Jennings, Jim Laurie + Kids, Elizabeth Monson, Holly Paar, Precious Phiri, Sven Pihl, Nick Rabb, Florence Reed, Janot Mendler de Suarez, Pablo Suarez, Adam Sacks, Steve Weinberg

Our Compendium Editor Revisits Miyawaki Forests

A full-grown Miyawaki Forest in India

Photo: Afforestt

Hannah is organizing her small city in northern France to grow them too, and the community has become very interested. Afforestt, an organization in India, is a primary Miyawaki promoter, and encourages you to grow a forest of your very own. Along with expert consulting, they offer generic instructions here, but of course you'll have to figure out exactly which species belong in your urban forest habitat.

While in Australia, William discovered permaculture, the land where it began.  He traveled around the country, met pioneer David Holmgren, and learned that permaculture wasn’t just about agriculture, it was a whole lifestyle, a new worldview. At first he was overwhelmed by the abundance that permaculture had to offer, but as he sorted it out it became clear to him what was next.  In 2014 he quit geology and took his savings to return home to his grandparents’ land.

He brought back a perspective on the relationship of permaculture to constant change.  Most of his life he has lived in the same bioregion, and even though he’s only thirty he’s seen changes in the land, and they are confirmed by his grandmother’s decades of experience.  More than ever a farmer has to be a nimble and acute observer.  He has adapted his approach accordingly.

Now he projects that things will get more unstable and everything on the farm has to be designed with that in mind.  He counts on more and more extremes.  For example, this year had normal rain, but normal is becoming exceptional.  Now most planting happens in fall - late fall has a lot of moisture compared to spring as spring droughts and then summers have grown hot and dry.

He wants to set up a system where as the  farm matures it becomes more resilient.  Nature is the model here, plant lots of seeds, see which survive.  The goal is a farm which maintains itself.  So for longterm best results he seeks the varieties of trees suitable for his very specific locations and micro-climates.  To do this he plants trees from seeds - e.g. 150 hazelnuts sourced from different places, planted densely without any special treatment, and after 3 years sees which survive harshness - summer droughts, flooding, late frosts.  He is now down to 50 varieties, and after two more years will select the 10 which best survive and propagate them from seeds or from cuttings, depending on the type of tree.

William says he’s thinking long term, and admits it’s easy to get saplings from a nursery, apply a lot of fertilizer and intensive care, but he’s much more keen on future-proofing.  “When you plant one tree, you don’t learn much about what happens and why.  But once you go through the initial selection process, you increase your chances of success significantly.  I start with collecting trees from many different places.  In the first year it’s a question of pure survival for them. The question in the second year is which grows fastest.  Third year it’s which produces the most fruit.  At first it takes longer, but it’s the best strategy to get crops to survive that extremes, especially if you don’t give them special care.  Nature spreads many seeds and a few survive in the search for the best genetics for specific conditions on my farm.”  William knows a good lesson when he sees one.

He is also a passionate teacher.  He is in the habit of collecting as much information as he can get his hands on, reviewing others’ opinions and taking them into account.  Most important to him is trying things out, experimenting and helping students.  Teaching helps him articulate what he’s learned in the clearest way possible.  

William Horvath's Permaculture Farm in Croatia

He says, “It’s easy for me to write something and share it.  I write for someone, choose a person to appeal to, someone who wants to do something for their land.  Writing for what I myself would need in that situation.  I learn something, write something, teach something - in a sense I’m writing an instruction manual for myself.  But I also like to probe deeper into the system and help people deal with society as it is right now, and find security in an uncertain future.  Mostly I write material that I would have liked to have had for myself that wasn't available to me.  Solving my own problem by sharing with others, knowing other people have same  problems that I do.

As for the next five to ten years, he says, “I envision doing the same thing I’m doing now.  My ultimate goal is to have a fully established farm.  We are headed for challenging times - I want to be prepared.  It’s my passion, and I also keep the big picture in the back of my mind.

Finally, I asked him how he saw the coronavirus from a permaculture perspective:

“Humans set up the conditions.  The natural world is just fighting back.  Viruses have their place in the evolution of humanity - creating an equilibrium among species.  We’ve gone so far down the lines of a modern lifestyle, we’ve neglected our immune systems. Coronavirus is a wild card we never expected. Two months lockdown and the whole economy falls down around us!  But we’ve been deforesting everything.  

“From a permaculture perspective our choices have consequences and the natural world fights back. These things will happen more and more.  What we can do is build our immune systems, stay away from media that is spreading fear constantly.  The economic consequences will lead to a great depression - permaculture tells us to regenerate as much as possible.  It’s a much better choice for reviving the planet.”

Check out William online at the Permaculture Apprentice. 

 

Compendium Notes

 

This is an excerpt from our  Compendium of Scientific and Practical Findings Supporting Eco-Restoration to Address Global Warming. The article below is from our seventh issue,  to be published in July 2020, Vol. 4 No. 1. We're pre-publishing it here because of its relevance to the Covid-19 pandemic.  Note that this paper, as well as many other pandemic-related papers in this issue, were all published prior to the current global episode.  Many experts knew this would happen, but we didn't pay attention.

"Impacts of biodiversity on the emergence and transmission of infectious diseases," Keesing et al. 2010

 

This paper contextualizes reduced transmission of infectious disease as one of the many ecosystem functions provided by biodiversity.

 

"Changes in biodiversity have the potential to affect the risk of infectious disease exposure in plants and animals—including humans— because infectious diseases by definition involve interactions among species. At a minimum, these species include a host and a pathogen; often many more species are involved, including additional hosts, vectors and other organisms with which these species interact."

 

Changes in biodiversity affect infectious disease transmission by changing the abundance of the host and/or vector; the loss of non-host species may increase the density of host species, increasing the encounter rates between pathogen and host.

 

Often, the species that remain when biodiversity is lost are those which are better pathogen hosts, while the lost species tend to be more resistant to infectious disease.

 

"In several case studies, the species most likely to be lost from ecological communities as diversity declines are those most likely to reduce pathogen transmission."

 

For example, the white-footed mouse, which are high-quality hosts both for the bacteria causing Lyme Disease and for the tick vectors, are abundant in both biodiverse systems and impoverished systems, while opossums, a poorer host for the Lyme bacterium that also kill/eat most ticks attempting to feed on them, do poorly in lower-biodiversity conditions.

 

"Therefore, as biodiversity is lost, the host with a strong buffering effect—the opossum—disappears, while the host with a strong amplifying effect—the mouse—remains."

 

There may be a causal link between a species’ susceptibility to biodiversity loss and its quality as a disease host. Among vertebrates, "resilience in the face of disturbances that cause biodiversity loss, such as habitat destruction and fragmentation, is facilitated by life history features such as high reproductive output and intrinsic rates of increase. Vertebrates with these features tend to invest minimally in some aspects of adaptive immunity; we hypothesize that this may make them more competent hosts for pathogens and vectors."

 

Biodiversity also affects the emergence of infectious disease, such as the evolution of a new strain of pathogen in the same host (due to antibiotic resistance, for example), and the spillover to a new host species. Pathogen establishment in humans from other animal hosts is related to mammal species richness (a larger source pool), and land-use change (such as deforestation), which increases contact between humans and pathogen hosts. The pathogen then becomes an epidemic due to the new host species’ density (domesticated animals and humans).

 

The authors recommend preserving biodiversity by protecting natural habitat, while also preserving microbial diversity within organisms by limiting the use of antimicrobial agents. A diverse microbiome within an organism serves as a buffer against pathogens.

Last But Not Least. . .

You're concerned about the current state of the Earth, and we are working for you, our young people, and the diverse web of life we all rely on.

 

Not to put too fine a point on it, we just want to say that we're a small non-profit doing BIG things.

 

Your support and involvement are very important! Please  . . .

. . . and a monthly donation is easy on your budget but is a major contribution to our work.

 

Many thanks!