Make soil not war

Preamble

I was perusing old photos and this caught my eye from the People’s Climate Assembly at Parliament House, Canberra, in Feb 2020.

Is there a better mantra for our times?

Here at Island Biologicals, Lee and I (Kirsty) are praying hard for our brother-in-law’s family in Iran, and holding their loved ones tight in our hearts. They are lovely people who have endured so much. Simultaneously, the war that threatens their very lives is threatening our livelihoods in Australia with inflation, shortages and who knows what to come.

Equally, we in Australia have reached a critical juncture regarding our soils. Their resilience is at an all time low and if we expect to make it out of here with enough food, income, clean air, potable water and many of the things that make life worth living, we’d better help them out.

Let me get on my soap box. 

Taking back some power

While certain powerful factions carve a path of destruction and inflict suffering on millions we watch on with all the vicarious trauma. It’s a lot. It’s overwhelming and can feel disempowering.

Growing soil, seeing life come back to your land, health return to your plants and animals, it is a balm to the soul. This is something within your domain that you can do that will feed your personal power bank but it will also contribute to regional stability by buffering climate impacts, restoring water and nutrient cycles, providing food sovereignty and so on. The more people who do it, the bigger the impact. Growing soil is a direct counterbalance to warmongering.

A new opportunity

We are seeing not just wars, but through social media now everyone is connecting the dots to underlying power structures that are driving them. Old, destructive patterns are being brought to light at a scale they never have before. The collapse of the old familiar with the awareness of just what a multi-crisis pickle we’re in comes with a lot of rage, grief, and fear. And we must process all that.

But it also comes with opportunity we haven’t known for centuries to re-write how we do things in a way that works for everyone. What are we doing now to create the world we want? What comes next? Are we letting the same nihilists decide that or are we having a say? Nobody knows exactly how this will all come together but building soil = a fantastic win-win first step.

The real mind virus

The wars and genocides we are watching now are a stark examples of the coloniser mindset. Very similar to the ‘patriarchal’ mentality we see at its most grotesque in the Epstein files. This is the same entitled, extractive mindset we embody when we see our land only as a growing medium. When we take harvest without feeding the microbial life that grew it, and allow the soil to die, earthworms to be wiped out, native animals displaced or poisoned, first nations wisdom suppressed.

Growing soil means partnering with our land. Collapsing the hierarchy and separation between man and Nature. We become collaborators in creating life. War is not who we are, it is a symptom that we have gone astray. Make soil, get back in balance.

Who wins?

The war most impacting us here in Australia now through fuel and fertiliser shortages and insane price rises is the Iran war. This war, at least in part, is about oil. We feed our plants with fossil fuels. Urea is a transformation of crude oil and we are told it is essential to food production. Follow the money on that lie. Yes it makes plants bigger but it also makes them weaker, sicker, less palatable and less nutritious, all the while degrading soils. At a huge scale. Oil has more power than it deserves and we are inflating it when we rely on it to grow our sustenance.

Growing soil (and robust, healthy plants) needs biology – life. Plants know how to get their own nitrogen, the trouble is we don’t let them because modern farming practices don’t enable soil to function as a productive living organism. Nurturing it through soil building practices will generate more productivity than we could even imagine. We have seen this with our own eyes on farms that are doing it. When you do this you, the farmer, win, with your community, not the oil magnate. Perhaps this is why it is not more common?

Connect with us

If you would like to make soil not war, we would love to connect! Here are some ways you can: