Regenerative ontology
Thesis
Agriculture is the stewardship of the Earth’s economy. What is now thought of as an industry grew from our instincts into cultures that allowed us to grow from the nomadic hunter-gatherer into civilized people with homes. For 10,000 years, agriculture grew the energy to grow our societies and civilizations at a ratio of 5-10 calories of positive energy for every calorie we consumed. Even the fossil fuels we now use to power our civilizations come from plants grown when the Earth produced more photosynthetic energy than humans consumed. Today, we consume 13 calories from fossil fuels for every 1 calorie of food we produce. We have broken the Earth’s regenerative energy cycle and lost our sense of culture.
Matter and energy are constant and constantly regenerating in the carbon cycle, within the integrity of Nature and the Earth’s economy as a whole. Only people have the mental capacity to alter the Earth’s cycle of life and to act counter to the integrity of Nature or to decide to act with integrity and in concert with Nature. How we have managed the Earth’s carbon cycle to produce our food, fiber and fuels define our culture as people. This is our agriculture, cultivated from the soil, place, and rituals it grew.
Our civilizations have grown from the cultivation of their soil. As a result, our cultures are naturally rooted in the places they have grown from. Our homes reflect and inform the care we take of them and ourselves. The industrialization of agriculture is counter to the integrity of Nature, as it forces the farmer, the land, and place to conform to meet the needs of industry, not the needs of the land, people, and each other. Agriculture has allowed us great advances as a species. However, since the rise of the industrial age, the health, safety, and security of people and the Earth have never been more threatened because of the loss of our culture, our agriculture, to industrialization.
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Did you know that our food system exhausts 13 Calories of energy for every 1 calorie of energy it produces in food, and throws 40% of what it grows away?
Science is validated with math
Thesis
To live beyond the Earth’s capacity for life, we have broken the cycle of life with mechanical combustion technologies. We released the Earth’s stored carbon, water, and energy by burning hydrocarbon fossil fuels without a reciprocal cycle to naturally return our waste to nature’s regenerative cycle. The combustion reaction product (Carbon Dioxide and Water) is the same as cellular respiration (how plants breathe). By burning fossil fuels, we have artificially increased the respiration of the Earth to fuel the harvest of its forests, prairies, minerals, waters, and soils. We have disrupted the very things that give the Earth the capacity to process respiration and offset our combustion-fueled activities. This is not good stewardship of the Earth’s economy.
The Cycle of Life - A Balanced Equation
Photosynthesis
6CO2 + 6H2O + E → C6H12O6 + 6O2. = Carbohydrates and Oxygen
Cellular Respiration
C6H12O6 + 6O2 + E → 6CO2 + 6H2O = Water and Carbon Dioxide
The Fossil Fuel Cycle – An Incomplete Equation
Combustion Reaction: Fuel (Hydrocarbons) + Oxygen → Carbon Dioxide + Water
There is no natural reciprocal process for mechanical combustion,
because nature did not create it.
To solve this problem, we must complete the equation. We need new food and energy systems and technologies that complete the cycle of life for resources that have been exhausted and regenerate, the exhaust in the carbon cycle. To meet human needs for power going forward, adaptable, scalable, and transportable fuels will need to come from regenerative agricultural sources if they are to be prosperous in perpetuity. This will require a new Natural Capital Order, a value system that accounts for all matter and energy in Nature, not just that used at the time.
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Did you know that our food system exhausts 13 Calories of energy for every calorie of energy it produces in food and throws 40% of what it grows away?
How do we fix our systems?
Our systems are not broken.
Our systems are misguided. They are extremely effective at doing what they were designed to do, grow America. Our systems are some of humankind’s greatest accomplishments. It is our guidance system, our culture, starting with our agriculture, that is broken. After the “New Deal,” and in preparation for World War II, for lots of reasons and misunderstandings that are no longer relevant today, we created systems built to grow production, not soil, farmers, businesses, and communities and with little regard for the Earth’s resource supply or the exhaust created by our actions. Today’s economic metrics define success by the amount we consume (active capital) and do not account for input supplies or waste (reserve or exhausted capital), evidenced in our deficit spending.
Policies, banks, and most investors value Gross National Product (GNP), the amount of economics (individual exchanges) more than the health of the whole economy - the resources, community, and ecology, and the economics between them. The fees of transactions are valued more than the value of transactions themselves. The metric for a “good” return is solely volume, not meaning, and is devoid of care. This culture allows the ends to justify the means and has manifest itself in the largest disparities of wealth in America’s history and the largest manufactured ecological crisis in our species’ history on Earth. To reconcile our behavior, we must invest in people, planet and place, and cultural change, not just profit. The ends and the means must both be justifiable.
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Did you know that every 1% increase in organic matter results in as much as 25,000 gallons of available soil water per acre? Source - USDA NRCS
from sustainability to Regeneration
Restoring our Health
The leaves of plants of the plains and towering forests act as the lungs and solar panels of the earth. They provide the mechanics by which the Earth absorbs carbon and water to fuel the life cycle with carbohydrates. The roots of the plants are how the Earth drinks. Photosynthesis takes carbon from the air and combines it with hydrogen to make usable energy to fuel the life cycle. The roots create the pores to absorb water on the Earth’s surface and create the corridors to filter the water and recharge the aquifers below. Our rivers run clear with spring water bursting from aquifers that are full below when all is working properly.
Today our rivers are muddy from erosion because the water is just running off. Our aquifers are running dry because we use more than the earth can absorb, and there is a dead spot in the Gulf of Mexico from all the pollutants we send downstream. Our waters are the Earth’s circulatory system, whose blood is regenerated when water is filtered through the soil. When the circulatory system is healthy, its arteries are open, and the water flows into the soil, not over it. The “sustainable” solution is to conserve water. The regenerative solution is to stop abusing it. What government, industry, and agribusiness treat as an erosion problem is really a permeation problem caused by a misperception of how the world really works or just by rationalizing greed.
Our soils have been compacted to the point the Earth can no longer breathe or drink by an economic system that values the growth of economics over the health of the whole economy. For decades we have recognized the damage from our actions and tried to strive for “sustainability.” Unfortunately, what we have been trying to maintain is the very over-consumptive behavior causing the problems we are trying to overcome. If matter and energy are constant, so are the economics, as they are the exchanges between and of them. Since matter and energy cannot be created or destroyed, neither can economics. They, too, are constant. GNP is based upon the assumption that you can grow your economics without taking from the economics of another. This is impossible in nature, no matter how much we rationalize it by using personal ends to justify unnatural and immoral means. It is time to adjust our guidance system and move from sustainability to one of regeneration.
To accomplish economic wellness, we must grow our resources, community, the health of our ecology, and the equity of the economics between them all. If the economics grows, it should be because we have grown the whole economy, for everyone and everything. The only way to do that is to grow equity in the community or grow the community as a whole. This is a change of culture. In current economic thought, we approach economic problems with financial solutions. Creating equity requires social solutions. In a global community, growing equity is the only option.
If matter and energy are constant, growing one’s personal economy requires taking from another or deficit spending from reserve capital to live beyond one’s means. In a whole economy - one that accounts for everything - this is impossible, and it is incompatible with the integrity of Nature. Regenerative behavior requires biological solutions that create equity. There are no deficits or inequities in Nature.
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Did you know that burning fossil fuels produces 9 times more carbon dioxide annually than the Earth has the capacity to process? Source - U.S. EPA
Growing the Community
Reconciliation to Regeneration
In the end, there are only two ways to grow an economy: grow the community or heal the ecology. If you do not have the resources, the only way to acquire them is to grow your community to include people and places who do have them. If your community has all the resources they need and cannot access what they need, you must heal the ecology by creating equity. Therefore, the essence of economic and ecological health is the integrity of Nature and measured in our accounting of and responsibility to the whole. It is evidenced by inequity and wellness. Since only humans can act counter to this, the only way to cure our economic and ecological problems is to heal our culture with natural solutions and change people's values to eliminate and counter the effects of greed.
To move to regeneration, we must develop cultures that value our resources, community, and ecology equally and do the hard work of growing the soil to heal our land, rivers, communities, and economy. We need to invest our resources and efforts in people, planet, and place to restore the cycle of life to one of perpetual prosperity and zero waste.
The Cycle of Life, A Balanced Equation
Photosynthesis
6CO2 + 6H2O + E → C6H12O6 + 6O2. = Carbohydrates and Oxygen
Cellular Respiration
C6H12O6 + 6O2 + E → 6CO2 + 6H2O = Water and Carbon Dioxide
To restore the carbon cycle, we must regenerate the basic building blocks of life (carbon, water, and energy) and restore the natural and equitable balances of reserve and active capital by returning exhausted capital to the regenerative process through natural means. This goes beyond sequestration to employing Nature’s power and biological cycles to return exhausted capital to the carbon cycle and reserve and active states, using methods in which both the ends and the means are regenerative, justifiable, and within the integrity of Nature. It requires making responsible decisions that are transparent accountable and verifiable with existing and new regenerative technologies.
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