11/15/2024
The Great Underground Boogie: American Climate Partners Special Message #2
Below is the second of four messages sent each week in November about how our organization is working to fix the climate.
November 14, 2024
Dear Friend of American Climate Partners,
Microbes, organisms which are too small to be seen with the naked eye, have always been here – for four billion years, according to biologists. First there were bacteria, then 2.5 billion years later, their soil colleagues, fungi, showed up, terraforming Earth into the paradise it is today. Throughout all those millions of years, multiple extinction events, and multiple geologic epochs, the microbes survived, doing their dance with plants in a great underground boogie humans have only recently begun to understand. Through a thousand-million-year root zone dance party, plants exchange sugar for their microbial partners’ minerals. In this triple swing, Mother Nature creates nutrient dense plants and skies with human healthy amounts of carbon, water, and nitrogen.
The party ended in 1909, the year German chemist Fritz Haber discovered how to produce ammonia from atmospheric nitrogen. Using Haber’s process, the chemical company BASF created synthetic “fertilizer” for the first time, and then nitrate for World War I munitions. (His processes were later used to create chlorine gas and cyanide, but that’s another story.) For the first time in Earth’s history, plants would no longer need to depend on the natural, healthy soil ecosystem for nitrogen.
Only 13 years later, Rudolf Steiner gave his first lecture on “Biodynamic Agriculture,” describing the results of fields managed with these new chemical fertilizers – degraded soil, crops, and livestock. Now, on the 100th Anniversary of Steiner’s talk, animals (including insects) worldwide suffer from consumption of obese, nutrient dilute plants, and the biochemistry of our land, rivers, and air is, for Holocene animals (particularly including us) – dangerously unbalanced.
In last week’s message I described how we can restore our climate to a healthier condition for human life by moving carbon and water from the air to the ground, and moving nitrogen from the ground to the air. It’s what I refer to in shorthand as 2 Down, 1 Up. A Sisyphean task for humans, you say? I agree. But we are not alone. We can rediscover the old ways, the ancient wisdom of creatures much older than us, the microbes. Australian soil ecologist Christine Jones says we don’t have to train, pay, monitor, or use AI to verify their work – just let them live and the microbes know what to do.
For the past decade, American Climate Partners staff have been researching and developing 2 Down, 1 Up land and water management methods. I am well aware that the intention of fixing the climate through a new partnership with microscopic animals below our feet sounds preposterous to some. The fact that this is so reflects the myth of our mindset, that “the environment” is a thing in a space separate from us, that logically leaves the pursuit of salvation through soil health to be trifling.
Good lands, rivers, and skies are not driven solely by chemistry and physics, which historically have been the foundations of conservation programming. Today as the world beneath our feet reveals itself, we are learning biology, life itself, may be the real driver. Next week’s message will describe how each of our programs working in the mid-Atlantic, Appalachian, and Southern regions of the U.S. acts in harmony with native macro- and micro-life forms to begin healing our atmosphere from a century of industrialism.
