Not Climate Change – Poisoned Soil That Can’t Breathe.
Zach Bush Awakening a New Story.
It’s impossible that CO2 is our problem, because it’s the source of life. It’s the source of energy that makes life possible.
There is a tendency for us to just think, we’re making too much CO2 through fossil fuels, etcetera. But really what’s happening is, the CO2 in the atmosphere is the future battery for life on the planet. It’s impossible that CO2 is our problem, because it’s the source of life. It’s the source of energy that makes life possible. So, what’s the deal with the CO2 in the atmosphere? What is it showing us? If that’s not the problem, what is?
It turns out, my background as a medical doctor, that I have studied extensively a very similar condition in humans, an accumulation of CO2 rising in the bloodstream over time and at no point have we decided that the CO2 is the crisis that caused the problem. The condition is called emphysema. And when you lose the surface area of the lung tissues, you can no longer exchange the CO2 you get too much CO2 in the bloodstream, not enough at the cellular level. You cannot exchange (breath) properly and you get this rise in CO2. But at no point do we, as doctors stop and say, “Oh my God, this patient has CO2 overdose.” It is understood that it’s the failure of the lungs that is making that happen.
It was some weird political-scientific pseudoscience that evolved to convince us that the planet did not have emphysema, that we just had CO2 poisoning.
We have emphysema on this planet. The surface of the planet’s lung that has died is the soil. The soil holds 10 gigatons of carbon annually as a living system. We produce about 40 gigatons of a 10,000 gigaton reservoir. Human production of CO2 is a drop in the bucket compared to the carbon cycle of all of life on Earth.
The amount of leaves that drop off our trees and rot in the winter, that’s much more carbon than we produce as humans. That cycle is actually how life happens. It’s the death and rebirth of that carbon cycle that allows life to iterate into more and more complex systems. To become more and more energetic with every cycle.
What we have right now on this planet is a biologic collapse, not a chemistry problem. We don’t have climate change, we have biological collapse. If we stop collapsing the biology, the earth is going to take a big breath. Because it turns out that these lungs of the Earth can recover in a single season.
Our nonprofit ‘Farmer’s Footprint’ has been working with others across the world to accelerate the adoption of farmers shifting out of chemical management of soil to a biologic management of soil. When they emphasize biological processes of respirating carbon through the soil, their bottom line goes up 5X in a couple years. But more importantly, their carbon energetic exchange rapidly increases in the plants they grow. Their plants become disease resistant. No need for the herbicides or pesticides. There are no invasive weeds. There are no insects that are threatening healthy plants.
We really need to shift this global narrative about this crisis. We need to come to the realization that we are wiping out biology, by overdosing on chemistry. The irony of this situation is that the very thing that’s killing the biology is chemistry, and this chemistry is an unnatural contribution from human chemical industries that has poured herbicides and pesticides onto this planet at an extraordinary rate.
We’re currently pouring 4 billion pounds of just one of those herbicides, glyphosate, into our soil and water systems annually. We only have 8 billion people on the planet. How is it that every person is demanding half a pound of glyphosate per year to keep their food system going?
Glyphosate, it turns out, is a potent antibiotic. When that antibiotic touches the soil, you lose the microbial and fungal base (the microbiome) of your soil system, and you create an emphysema.
The following year, with the earth’s respiratory breath, that big deep breath in spring, that that nature does, is a little less deep. Because there is a little less lung surface to bring in the energy that will define the spring, the summer and the harvest of next year.
What’s happening on our planet? Industries dominating our experience with small chemicals that are destroying the biology that life depends on. Creating the imbalance of chemistry in the atmosphere, and in the soil. Adding more chemicals to the soil and the atmosphere can never correct the biology. This is extremely concerning to me because we’ve created a system here at COP (The United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP28), where every year governments and peoples pledge more money to carbon offsets to carbon trading. It’s now estimated, I think, around $40 trillion have been pledged through this organization. $40 trillion has been pledged by 2050 to address this carbon crisis.
Is an extraordinary number that suggests that it’s not actually trying to solve anything because we have found that it’s actually cheaper to run agricultural systems without the chemicals, so there’s no need for the $40 trillion to heal the lungs.
There is a need for a shift in the metrics by which we measure our crisis. We need to stop measuring the CO2 in the atmosphere as if that is the problem. We might start measuring it as a prognosis for the lungs that we now trust our farmers to manage, (not the chemical companies and hedge funds).
This is the transition we must make. We need a change in the story to help the world understand we don’t have a chemistry problem. We have a collapse of biology. This isn’t climate change or global warming. This is the death of the lungs of a planet that’s getting ready to breathe deep again.
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Extreme Hangout COP28 | Zach Bush – Storyteller (youtube.com)